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Comment by lstyls | Hacker News Reader

Facebook pays its bills via selling ads, which is not the same as selling data. Snapchat can do same - I'm sure they have plenty of resources to help them do this, and Twitter is an example of a company with a similar user base that makes money. My point is that monetization does not necessarily lead to failure as you had asserted.

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"Twitter is an example of a company with a similar user base"

Twitter has professionals and many people over the age of 18, so the user base is much different. Facebook is the same. My Mom and Dad are both on Facebook. If you notice, Facebook started becoming profitable when the moved outside of Universities.

Snapchat is mostly students and teenagers. I'm 38 and neither I nor any of my friends have ever used Snapchat (Most wouldn't even know what it is and I only know because I'm interested in Startups).

My point is that if you have no chance of moving outside of the student/teenager demographic with an app like this, it will be very difficult to monetize.

There was a point when Facebook and Twitter were both almost exclusively used by students and teenagers. 6 months ago, I would never imagine having a snapchat, "because I don't need to send dick pics to anyone and if I did, I wouldn't rely on an app to automatically delete it." Yet for the past 6 months, it's slowly become the social network that I use more than any of the others. It's fundamentally changed the way I interact with my friends. And now, I've been seeing an increase in the amount of people "snaping mom and dad."

This has all of the chance in the world to move out of its current demographic, it'll just take time.

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