
Confidential metrics for Snapchat features - danso
https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-the-data-snapchat-doesnt-want-you-to-see
======
IBM
Snap's fate was preordained because of the vice grip Google and Facebook have
on online advertising. The only way to deal with market failures is aggressive
antitrust enforcement. The EU has begun and others are sniffing around [1][2].
Democrats are starting to relearn the politics of trust busting [3] and
candidates are starting to run on antitrust platforms [4]. If you work at a
startup and you don't want your opportunity to be foreclosed by monopolies,
you should support them.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/missouri-
googl...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/missouri-google-
investigation.html)

[2] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-antitrust-
internet...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-antitrust-
internet/israels-anti-trust-regulator-to-look-at-internet-giants-
idUSKBN1EX1AQ)

[3]
[https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...](https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017/the-
democrats-confront-monopoly/)

[4]
[https://twitter.com/AustinFrerick/status/950149470863417347](https://twitter.com/AustinFrerick/status/950149470863417347)

~~~
tyleraldrich
Perhaps there isn't just a good way to weave advertising into an app
originally designed to send ephemeral pictures to friends? It seems like
that's the real reason Snaps fate was preordained, and has nothing to do with
Google/FBs ad empire.

~~~
IBM
I'd believe that if advertisers weren't shifting their budgets over to
Instagram Stories at Snap's expense [1][2].

[1] [http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/snap-stock-
pr...](http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/snap-stock-price-
downgraded-ad-buyers-prefer-instagram-2018-1-1012475903)

[2] [https://digiday.com/marketing/scale-matters-advertisers-
opti...](https://digiday.com/marketing/scale-matters-advertisers-opting-
instagram-snapchat/)

~~~
tyleraldrich
Instagram and Snapchat share exactly 1 feature ("Stories"), so I really don't
see how this shows that Snapchat is failing due to Google/FB monopoly, and not
due to the reason I listed above.

Instagram is more analogous to Twitter, and I assume advertisements occur both
within the "Stories" and the newsfeed - this seems much more favorable to
advertisers and is something advertisers are more used to.

~~~
IBM
When Facebook can graft Snap features onto every endpoint of their network,
there's no oxygen left for Snap. They cannot get scale, and that's what you
need in advertising.

~~~
rgbrenner
180m daily active users is not scale?

When Facebook IPOd, they had 160m _monthly_ active users, and had $3.7B in
revenue with $1B in profits.

And yet with more users, Snapchat pulls in $200m in revenue last quarter, and
lost $440m.

The users are there. That's not their problem.

~~~
skewart
The online advertising world has changed a lot since Facebook's IPO. 180m
users and an awkward ad buying experience aren't as compelling as they used to
be.

Plus, it sounds like not all of those 180m Snapchat users are interacting with
the part of Snapchat where they would see ads, so the audience is smaller.

That said, I completely agree that a lack of users isn't preventing them from
having a decent advertising business. It's just preventing them from doing it
on the terms they want.

------
virgilp
If you're just interested in the data and not the long article, here it is:

[https://www.scribd.com/document/368759484/Snapchat-Data-
Lore...](https://www.scribd.com/document/368759484/Snapchat-Data-Lorenz)

~~~
chatmasta
The range of average minutes per day on the app is between 32 and 37 minutes.
That's insane and honestly pretty sad, especially when you consider how few
people _only_ use snapchat. How much time is wasted across all the different
social media apps?!

~~~
volgo
Why do you think it's wasted? Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted. Most
people use it to message their friends, and communication with people you like
is one of the key joys of living

I mean, how much time do you "waste" on HN? :)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Where is the line though? What is genuine enjoyment versus a dopamine hit,
like a mouse pounding on the lever to get as much cocaine or electrical
impulses possible? It’s all chemical reactions in the end I suppose (says my
internal nihilist).

~~~
adjkant
I think a key difference is that Snapchat is not a feed app. There's no
endless scrolling to waste 30 minutes on to give you that dopamine hit. The
time spent is mostly being spent as a messaging app I suspect if you look at
the levels of use of app features. Do you think it's a problem to spend half
an hour a day texting + sending pictures to people?

~~~
xPhobophobia
Not endless, but there is a feed of snap stories always.

~~~
chatmasta
Not if you don’t have any friends! Boom, problem solved.

------
p33p
I wish it wasn't such a clickbait title as the information in the article is
pretty interesting.

From an investor perspective I don't see how Snapchat is appealing at all. The
general numbers provided here only reaffirm my opinion.

From an employee perspective, the workplace at Snap sounds toxic and to be
avoided.

~~~
jyrkesh
Do you have a source on the toxicity? I know people working at Snap, and they
mostly have good things to say about the engineering culture.

------
danso
From the latter half of the article, a purported example of a positive
trending data point:

> _Investors who reviewed the data also said the fact that people are sending
> and receiving so many photo messages on the platform gives it a huge leg up
> on iMessage or Facebook Messenger._

> _The majority of conversation that happens on most chat apps is text-based,
> and other platforms struggle to get users to exchange photos or videos.
> Investors said that completely visual messaging at this scale is “a pretty
> big deal.”_

> _All of this backs up Spiegel’s own depiction of Snapchat. In the past, he
> has said that users taking selfies on the app aren’t being vain or snapping
> photos to post later on social media, they’re “talking with pictures.”_

I get the appeal of Snapchat but never got into using it. The only social
media chatting I use is Facebook and I do it with other old people who prefer
text. Is there something about the Snapchat implementation that makes image-
chatting more natural and frictionless compared to Facebook or Instagram? And
what leverage does this image-heavy chat habit have for Snapchat, if those
users can't be drawn to the other money-making features?

~~~
hamandcheese
I would hazard a guess that the disappearing nature of the images makes it
much more natural to share candidly. Most the things I snap are nowhere near
worthy of being immortalized on Facebook, or even in iMessage for that matter.
But a quick snap? Sure, why not? Its second nature to snap a quick pic of
whatever I'm doing and send it to the relevant person/people, and it makes for
a much more rich experience compared to other platforms.

Aside from that, the disappearing nature of chats at all (be it text, image,
video) I believe also leads to more engaging conversations. Participants have
to be paying attention to one another lest they forget the last response, in
stark contract to every other popular messaging platform. The result is that
less conversations happen, but when they do they feel more engaging (and
addictive... no doubt this is part of the strategy).

~~~
coralreef
Face filters are also pretty fun and Snapchat was the first to do that.

~~~
hamandcheese
Agreed, but that can also be replicated, whereas most platforms would be very
hesitant to switch to disappearing messages by default. I think this is a (if
not the) key differentiator.

If you couldn't tell, I'm big on snapchat as a messaging platform, not as a
social platform.

~~~
adjkant
> "I'm big on snapchat as a messaging platform, not as a social platform."

As a user, I think this is why most people fail to understand it or use it.
Even if one has friends on Snapchat, if you go in trying to use it as social
media you're going to be confused. It's a personal messaging app that happens
to have some small social aspects, a map that I occasionally use so I can see
where people are, and publisher content when I'm looking to kill a few minutes
here and there. But 90% of my time is spent messaging people with pictures /
chats, and groups are amazing.

------
samfriedman
From hearing how much Spiegel & leadership hate leaks, I wonder if they have
some kind of watermarking in place for sensitive data. E.g. a trustworthy
leader has access to the full, real data, and each engineer/analyst upon
querying for dating receives results slightly fuzzed by a known amount. If
that data is leaked to the press, the fuzzing could let leadership burn the
mole.

Has there been any proof-of-concept or product for data watermarking at the DB
level?

~~~
ben_jones
It would require so much work to do that at a large bureaucratic company with
multiple layers of management across multiple teams. You'd be putting up gates
for every time some designer wants to restyle a button, every marketing person
who wants to to a/b testing, and every infrastructure engineer who wants to
test a release or do load testing.

------
chollida1
> “If DAUs go down or stay flat, the stock could go under $10,” one former
> employee said. “I feel like if that happens most people at the company will
> just quit. I know several friends already looking to get out.”

That might be optimistic on the part of the employee.

Snap chat is in a bad position in that they don't have their Donald Trump like
twitter to keep in in vogue, and they don't have their advertising cash cow
like Google/FB to make it profitable.

Heck due to their screwy share structure they don't even have the passive
investment to prop up the stock that almost all other public companies do.

And due to the lack of voting they also remove the option of a forced takeover
like GoPro does to give merger arb funds a reason to hold the stock.

To paraphrase Stephen Fry

Snap is the company that peed in the pool for all other investors wrt to
ownership control :(

[http://www.stephenfry.com/2016/02/peedinthepool/](http://www.stephenfry.com/2016/02/peedinthepool/)

------
j_m_b
There doesn't seem to be a clear reason to use Snapchat if you don't already
know people on it. I found the app itself so confusing, I needed someone to
explain to me how to use it and what the point of it was. That is a UI smell
to me.

As an investor, I wouldn't have much confidence in this product when top
executives are departing after the IPO. The culture is exactly antithetical to
the agile environment most developers are accustomed to and I don't see how
they can attract talent. I don't even know how Snapchat could be monetized.

Contrast that to Instagram, a simple app based on Images and Videos with a
clear way to monetize it (sponsored posts). If you can use Facebook, Twitter,
etc. you can use Instagram. They can also easily clone any 'killer feature'
that may come out Snapchat.

~~~
emodendroket
I saw a few times posited the idea that Snapchat is some kind of dividing line
between older milennials and younger ones/younger generations in that if
you've never installed it or can't understand how/why to use it you're in the
former group.

~~~
j_m_b
Yep, thought of that article when I made the comment. If the appeal is limited
to a particular generation, that's bad news. The person who showed me how to
use it doesn't really use it anymore. Anecdotally, that tells me people grow
out of it.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, maybe, but if, theoretically, the app were popular with everybody born
after 1995 or so the problem would eventually solve itself. I've never known
anybody who uses it though.

------
tw1010
Man, given that some youtube channels get ~5 million per day, isn't ~85
million per day using snapchat kind of low? I would expect way more than only
20x interaction with snapchat than with one-man shows like that. 20 big
channels and you're up to the entirety of snapchats user-base.

------
foobaw
I've known people who worked at Snapchat and told me it was a haven for Visa
sponsorship. This isn't a negative but it's possible that turnover will be
extremely high once these employees get their visas/greencards.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
What does a 'haven' mean in this case? Most biggish employers in the valley
are happy to apply for work visas and green cards.

~~~
foobaw
Haven as in people join JUST for their visas and green cards. This also means
they'll leave once they meet their objective.

------
sgwealti
None of the stories in the Discover section ever appeal to me. Snapchat is
great for sexting and in the gay community is used by a lot of people to
create/share amateur porn. Maybe they could monetize that somehow.

------
minimaxir
The key thing to note for Snapchat is the growth rate over time, especially
since charts during the IPO indicated DAU growth has flatlined.

The charts in this article have truncated y-axes so growth is harder to
eyeball. I wish the article included a more statistical approach to the new
data.

Also, what happened on July 7th that caused the big dip in metrics?

~~~
huac
> Also, what happened on July 7th that caused the big dip in metrics?

looks like logging outage

------
habosa
Just looking at the patterns I'd guess they have a huge amount of usage from
school-age kids.

In the summer months you see higher engagement per user. You also see a
compression of the weekday-weekend cycle. Both imply that something in the
summer makes users use it more and especially on weekdays. Gotta be students.

------
dsnuh
I have never understood the appeal of Snapchat and it seems destined to fail,
but that said, I did think those glasses they developed were a cool, new,
surprising idea from what I had considered an app company.

------
puranjay
This is such a poorly written article. The lede is buried beneath a thousand
words of filler.

Whatever happened to the reverse pyramid writing style?

------
grzm
Perhaps a less-click-baity title adapted from the subtitle:

"Snapchat stakeholders kept in the dark about core feature performance"

------
samarvir
Summary - Snapchat is secretive about its user data - repeated 100 times!

~~~
dang
Please don't post shallow dismissals here. That's not at all an accurate
summary of the article.

------
adamnemecek
[deleted]

~~~
cobbzilla
I read "they" as a stand-in for "management":

"Evan is paranoid and management goes ballistic when there's a leak"

