

Ask HN: How come Snapchat and Facebook receive so much funding - NicoJuicy

Snapchat recently received 500 million $ in funding... Facebook a lot more.<p>Still, none of them can ask for any subscription billing for usage of the application...  (or people step over to the competition).<p>I don&#x27;t know any people who use something like Facebook credits... ( no one talks about it definatly)<p>So why do they receive so much in funding? Do investors really believe you can have so much influence on people&#x27;s lives, if you know a lot about them?<p>I don&#x27;t think i ever willingly clicked on an ad, i don&#x27;t &quot;like&quot; much on fb (just personal connections) (note: technical savy person).<p>Are there any other &quot;opportunities&quot; people see? I just realize that there will be another Facebook&#x2F;Snapchat arround the corner, just as MySpace had...<p>Already Facebook is trying hard to get the next &quot;popular&quot; social network app... Probably it won&#x27;t be from inside, but it will be bought (cfr. Instagram).
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smt88
All businesses must acquire customers. That's the core of business, as Peter
Drucker once said: turning regular people into customers.

Facebook and Snapchat have access to so many hundreds of millions of people,
they have two advantages:

1\. Their users can become customers very easily.

2\. Businesses are desperate to work with them to get intelligence and to
broadcast their ads.

Facebook's intelligence alone is worth trillions. Yes, trillions. It's
incredibly personal, accurate, detailed data for nearly 1 billion people. And
that's today, when mining data from photos is still in its infancy.

Fortunately for us, Facebook has a privacy policy that prevents them from
selling all of that data and getting all that money out of it. But what they
can sell is still worth an insane amount of money.

I think you just fundamentally misunderstand what makes you valuable to
Facebook. It's not "liking" things or clicking on ads necessarily. It's just
the fact that you visit.

~~~
NicoJuicy
My question remains the same, i could rephrase it though:

Why would the data be worth trillions, if you can't monetize it to trillions.

In practise (simplified): people search on Google (Google knows what you
probably want), but they buy on Amazon. Who is worth more, the one that has
the data or the one that has the goods and a % of the sale. (i'm excluding ads
here though, it's the only successfull monetizing scheme for data i have
encountered.. But ads are not worth trillions... Every next social startup
will do them

In practise 2: What happened to App.Net and Whatsapps yearly (1 $
subscription).

