
Snapchat reportedly hit 160M daily users and $400M revenue in 2016 - prostoalex
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/snap-ipo/
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fnovd
As someone who never really "got" Snapchat, I found this interesting:

>Snapchat has done an impressive job soaking up attention by covering three
different use cases with a single app: private messaging, social media Stories
broadcasting, and professional Discover content. These work together to give
people something to do even if their friends don’t post interesting stories,
they’re waiting for people to reply, or they don’t resonate with the featured
publishers.

~~~
ben_jones
Most people between the ages of 10-30 have been conditioned to pull out their
phone during the slightest feeling of boredom, awkwardness, loneliness, or of
course notification noise / buzz. It then becomes a question of which App gets
opened first which usually is decided by the amount of 'reward' generated by
the action.

I can only speak to my demo, but the order is usually:

Tier 1:

* Text messaging

* Snapchat

Tier 1.5:

* Tinder

* Mobile games (only applies to a subset of users 'gamers')

Tier 2:

* Facebook

* Instagram

Tier 3:

* Browser

* Mobile games (most people)

* Other

You'll notice personal communications falls above content sharing. Snapchat is
a definitive type of personal communication and is pretty firmly planted
(IMO).

~~~
matwood
If I pull out my phone I go right to HN, or the current book I'm reading. I'm
definitely old now...

~~~
plainOldText
Same here. In a sense HN is a sort of restricted social network for me, or
even a tribe if you wish.

Except we don't gather around the fire anymore, we gather around a website and
exchange stories not of hunting animals, but hunting bugs.

~~~
wapz
I'm still fairly new to HN but I love the quality of posts and expertise in
almost every technical thread.

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eddd
20% per year is not impressing to be honest. Don't get me wrong, I admire them
as a company, but the grow rate is too slow, to compete with top social
platforms.

~~~
nfbush
Better a company that generates revenue than one that uses all it's money on
growth and has billions $ negative. I hate this idea of a growth rate being
"too slow", all it does is encourage monopolisation which is bad for people.
Edit: spelling

~~~
existencebox
I'd honestly be curious to why this comment is being downvoted so much, as
I've often found myself agreeing with this refrain.

To pre-answer the common rebuttal I get, that VCs are taking moonshots at the
chance of a VERY HIGH return; I'd ask why not look at VC investments in the
sense of a more traditional portfolio, where you'd have your growth stocks,
your value stocks, etc. If I could find a vehicle that reliably gave 20% YOY
I'd throw fistfulls of money at it.

So can someone enlighten me as to why this isn't a viable way of looking at VC
investment?

~~~
mikedouglas
It's not a viable way to look at investing in ad companies. Advertising has
historically been zero-sum (about 2% of the economy), and there's huge returns
to scale (more data, bigger advertisers, etc). Unless your inventory is unique
(which it isn't), you need reach (which is why TV is/was such a great
platform). Look at Twitter, which is having a extremely difficult time w/ ads
because of that lack of scale.

In ads, you want to be GOOG/FB, not TWTR.

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aznpwnzor
And their GCP contract is for $400M a year?

~~~
hkothari
I came here wondering the exact same thing. Seems insane.

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lz400
I've been hearing they are losing a lot of users to Instagram, since the
latter basically copied the best features of Snapchat. Anyone has any opinion
on the topic?

~~~
pryelluw
IG is definitely ramping up features to compete. But I have a weird feeling
that it's going to end up being a camel. Snapchat on the other hand, is being
too selective with their advertising channels. They require ridiculously
expensive contracts that reflect the way TV ads are sold. What really bothers
me is that the stories are too short and I cant produce content and publish it
there.

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renegadesensei
Should I be experiencing FOMO over Snapchat? Is Snapchat one of those things
you only get into if all of your friends are doing it? (like, say heroin for
example)

~~~
incompatible
I once read this article: [https://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-
like-the-t...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-
teens)

which didn't make me feel that I was missing out on anything.

~~~
incompatible
Or perhaps I should say I know I'm missing out on something but I'm glad I'm
missing out.

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MrBra
Heaviest app on my phone ever.

Yea I don't have the latest Nexus smartphone, but I am sure it's not coded as
good as it could and should be.

~~~
wapz
Snapchat is terrible on Android. I'm surprised it got so popular (when FB had
a real heavy Android app I feel like a lot of people were using the web
interface instead).

~~~
MrBra
Yeah, and honestly I can't understand the decision of opening the camera in
transparency right on the first screen of the app, adding the camera opening
time to the rest.

And that feature only looks kind of bragging to me: "hey, look at how cool we
are", and I am sure some users will not even notice it.

Anyway, don't they test it and see how slow it ?

Or are they one of those company only interested in iOS and only developing
for Android marginally?

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ffef
Good for them

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bjshepard
Why should we trust these numbers?

~~~
slackoverflower
Because they publicly filed for IPO today and released all these numbers.

