what kind of a mad world do we live in where an app for sending pictures to your friends with a slight twist is worth $1B? That applies to both snapchat and instagram...
What kind of mad world do we live in where a graduate from one of the top universities in the world agrees to take a first job hawking ad space for a fad-of-the-year mobile app?
And some say there is no bubble in start-up world... If someone has any idea what is going on here please explain to me because I do not understand how we have come down to this.
There are 450 million Snapchats sent a day. Their engagement is insane and so is their month over month growth. Snapchat has created a new form of communication that a lot of people enjoy using. If we use other startups as benchmarks (Tumblr, Instagram), the valuation does not seem far-fetched.
That's because you need to build the money train yourself if you want to have one, even if it's guaranteed to fall off a cliff in the long run (like Snapchat).
How Snapchat will actual monetize remains a mystery, but if I had to guess I would say they are working on a paid snap system. I'm not sure how they would go about creating ads that are relevant to the user. If I got a snap from a random company I imagine it would just piss me off. Maybe they will offer an ad free version via subscription model.
Given the graph in the article, it wouldn't surprise me if Facebook made another get-all-users-so-it-doesn't-threaten-core-business acquisition a la Instagram.
Although in this case, Facebook tried making a Snapchat clone (Poke) and failed miserably, so such an acquisition might show a weakness in Facebook product strategy and be somewhat embarrassing.
I would love to see Facebook try to acquire Snapchat. They were so arrogant when they launched Poke, claiming they made the entire app in 12 days. I thought it was pretty low to make a full blown copy of Snapchat.
I actually wonder to what extent Facebook really planned Poke. The way it was always described, a small team built it over the course of a weekend- I can see it being a random project people decided to do that got launched without any major strategy behind it.
Snapchat was likely trying to value itself in comparative terms to Instagram. Instagram was a threat because it had both the meteorically rising product AND the engineering team capable of scaling ahead of that growth. I think Facebook created Poke not to compete directly, but as a response to the comparison to Instagram. Facebook "coded Snapchat in a weekend", literally.
I don't see how you can base a long term business model on a technology that can easily be broken (i.e. cracking the app so that photos aren't deleted after some time like the sender intended).
I guess in the short term they can make some money and transition to some other business model, but I feel like "SnapchatKeep" is just around the corner if it doesn't exist already.
if they had a feature to upload saved snapchats online, I would do it and share it through facebook and twitter, in fact I already do http://olaji.de/snapchat a lot of my friends find it hilarious and I have almost double the amount of snaps saved on my phone right now, than on the site... I plan to upload more and more while snapchat value goes up and up, I am a 20 year old college student, a lot of you older guys have trouble understanding...
sorry "understand snapchat", ojr is my snapchat, I should give you my password, you'll see a few of my college girl friends send you snaps and maybe you will be closer to undertanding...
It's not based on a technology. It's based on this sort of idea of transient photography- compare it to Instagram where everyone carefully curates every photo and ensures it has the right filter, etc. etc.- people Snapchat photos of themselves making stupid faces to each other.
I'm not saying that makes it worth $1bn, but I think the criteria is different than you make out.
