
Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat into a Real Business - freshfey
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-05-26/evan-spiegel-reveals-plan-to-turn-snapchat-into-a-real-business
======
k-mcgrady
Almost every single comment here is negative. Snapchat is going to die soon.
He doesn't know what he's doing. They're just going to use ads and then lose
users.

Let's see what you're done.

Snapchat has done well thus far not to alienate users while introducing
features that allow brands to get their content in front of users (discover).
Particularly difficult considering it's mostly a private network on which you
share with friends. They haven't any huge privacy scandals yet either - at
least none that have had an effect on usage.

It may seem like just another dumb app to a lot of people here and honestly I
thought the same for a while. My generation took quite a while to start using
it but now it's something we use a lot. It's great for sharing pictures you
don't need around forever on Facebook. Photos of nights out, as they happen
for people who can't be there. Candid snaps on holidays and trips. I don't see
it replacing Facebook for anyone but it seems to coexist nicely.

Most of the negativity here is actually quite familiar. It's the same crap
people spewed about Facebook for the last 6 years or so. Any none of it has
really come true.

Sorry for the rant.

~~~
striking
I've seen people for which it replaced Facebook. (Not Instagram, Facebook.
Instagram is their non-volatile memory, in this case.) For these groups,
having a Facebook is "uncool" and "for old people".

I don't know if it'll survive, but I love it to death. I'd be willing to pony
up a buck to keep it around.

~~~
clarky07
You say that, but the article states that 70% of teens use facebook vs. 40%
for snapchat. I'm not sure a service with a billion users can really be
labeled uncool by that many people.

~~~
striking
I really am focusing on the social elite of a small group of kids that I met
over the summer. They're from California and I live on the East Coast (where
Facebook is the norm). I'll be the first to admit that the plural of anecdote
is not data. Which is why I said "some groups of people."

In any case, I think the difference in user population is because of
accessibility to technology. Snapchat basically demands a swanky, whiz-bang
phone, which not all kids have. I'd be willing to bet that more than 30% of
kids (the difference in the statistics) lack a Snapchat-capable phone.

Being rich is cool, so apparently Snapchat is too. And it's cooler than
Facebook, making Facebook uncool. I understand that there are a long list of
logical fallacies in this section but hey, we're teens.

------
hnnewguy
> _At worst, they are the next-generation MTV_

Completely delusional.

I don't know what SnapChat will end up "being", but the idea that the _worst-
case-scenario_ is, for all intents and purposes, "incredibly successful" is so
far off the rails. How people can read things like this without at least
contemplating a tech bubble is beyond me.

~~~
sevenadrian
I don't think this is evidence of a tech bubble at large, but it is evidence
that tacking on monetization onto a mass-popular app/service/site isn't always
a slam dunk

------
nickysielicki
I'm just a dumb 20 year old with no business experience, but my opinion is
that Snapchat is going to die a very miserable death.

For lack of a better analogy, I think that young Americans with smartphones
have embraced a sort of unix philosophy with regards to their social
networking, which is to say, they want a service that does one thing and does
it well.

They have linkedin profiles for humblebragging about their long term
professional life. They have facebook for humblebragging about their long term
personal aspirations and achievements. They have twitter for sharing
unnoteworthy small thoughts. They have instagram for sharing noteworthy
moments that aren't necessarily major life events, and they have snapchat for
showing what they're doing right now.

They really don't want something that merges these in any way. The reason
being, for any given user publishing content on any of these networks, they
all are publishing to different audiences. I want my parents to see my
linkedin and to see my facebook. I don't want them to see my twitter
necessarily. I don't want them to see my snapchat. (FWIW, in reality I don't
have facebook, twitter, linkedin, or snapchat, but this is just an example of
how 18-24 y/os think.)

Google had a fix for the issue of audience with g+ and circles, but they fell
short on implementation, I think. There weren't enough different ways to share
content and shape your profile, pretty much just posts. If they had made
better ways to publish temporary posts, static info (like resume and work
experience), and to organize views of the site by circles rather than merging
them all together, I think they'd have succeeded.

The idea that snapchat can pivot to be anything other than an extension on MMS
is ridiculous to me. (It doesn't even do that now, by the way. No group
snapchats. The stupid filters like speed you're traveling and the current time
look absolutely terrible.)

I think users of snapchat like it for what it is, quick pictures shared to a
few people that you think might enjoy it. Nothing you want permanently on the
web. Maybe it can become something like periscope or meerkat. I think there's
also a market for advertising in the 'featured stories' part of the app, and
from the article, it sounds like where they're headed.

But their moves like snapcash, and any aspirations that are separate from
sharing temporary moments? Completely bewildering to me. I fear they're trying
to become something their users don't want snapchat to be.

One thing I will say, Spiegel seems like a really cool guy with a heart in the
right place and is probably a genius. I will not be surprised to see him
completely prove me wrong.

~~~
pa5tabear
>Spiegel seems like a really cool guy with a heart in the right place and is
probably a genius.

What do you base this opinion on?

I guess he might be cool but I don't think the press about him indicates
genius or a rightly placed heart.

~~~
nickysielicki
I like his disdain for targeted ads, in spite of the fact that this could
probably be profitable for his company.

I think the fact that he's made an internet company out of extending picture
messaging is amazing. As much many of us HN readers would like to scoff and
say, "I could build that in a weekend," we really couldn't. He's not done
anything technically difficult, per se, but the way that he's amassed users is
absolutely crazy, and he's doing something right.

I have my doubts about where it can go. I think him not selling was a huge
mistake and I think he'll lose a lot of money from it, but I think he's a
savvy business man.

~~~
hnnewguy
> _I like his disdain for targeted ads, in spite of the fact that this could
> probably be profitable for his company._

I don't agree with the idea that all a company has to do is tack on ads and
they'll be wildly profitable. I think that ship has sailed; the _more_ ads
we're bombarded with, the less effect each individual ad has on us. There are
diminishing returns to ad optimization. We can only buy so much stuff.

There will be some interesting times in the near future surrounding this ad-
driven ecosystem.

------
kneel
This company is worth 15B?

~~~
cosarara97
Some people with that kind of money seem to think so. It looks a lot like a
bubble to me, though (and it might be related, since bubbles give money to the
smart ones).

------
wyc
TLDR summary:

“Evan views advertising as a product, while most Internet founders view
advertising as a necessary evil.”

Snapchat may have overestimated the pull it has with advertisers. It started
its program by charging about $100 per 1,000 views, or more than $750,000 for
a day-long campaign, more than double the rates of YouTube or Hulu. Other
companies have balked at ponying up for ads on a service that still lacks some
of the basic targeting and measurement tools now standard in digital
advertising.

This month the company announced it would start to charge $20 per 1,000 views.
The company declined to say where prices started.

------
baristaGeek
PG's "What Microsoft is the Altair Basic of?" applies really well to Snapchat.

They aren't going to be "the next generation Viacom", but they are truly going
to disrupt the entertainnment industry.

Advertising is something necessary in the capitalist system, advertising won't
disappear anytime soon. The aggregate value comes when it's blended to the UX
through smoother mechanisms. That's Snapchat's philosophy and a lot of other
companies will opt for that philosophy as well.

------
MichaelGG
330 employees? Am I correct in guessing most of them are in sales? I know
Twitter has thousands so 330 is relatively few, but that seems like an awful
lot of people.

Also, the explanation for why they don't label buttons is "it's something
new"? And that engineers are busy making new products? Is this bad editing or
reading comprehension, or ?

~~~
onewaystreet
Large venture-backed companies tend not to hesitate in hiring people. You got
engineering teams (frontend, backend, mobile, QA, other), design teams, devops
teams, marketing, sales, bizdev, support, hr, management, etc.

------
coldtea
> _Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat into a Real Business_

Let me guess: showing ads?

If advertising was banned, 99% of the web would lose its "business model"
overnight...

...but the rest would be actual businesses with actual customers paying for
their products.

------
Animats
Their big revenue concept is vertical video for commercials. That's not too
impressive.

There's a life cycle for social networks:

\- New cool thing, but no monetization. \- Big growth. \- Ads and spyware
added. \- Growth slows. \- More ads added to boost revenue. \- Growth stops.
\- More ads, more tracking. \- Users leave. \- Collapse.

AOL, Geocities, Orkut, and Myspace have already completed their life cycle.
Facebook and Twitter are at "More ads added to boost revenue", and entering
the "growth stops" phase.

(Focusing on cool can backfire. Coca-Cola has that problem. While frantically
advertising and changing their packaging, their product quality has dropped.
They once worked hard to get expired product out of stores and checked drink
dispensers for over-diluting their product. They don't bother any more, and
their products taste like crap about half the time.)

~~~
clarky07
if facebook is at a growth stops phase, it's possible it's because they've
almost saturated their target market. They have something like 1.5 billion
users. That's Billion, with a B. How many of those dead services you mentioned
ever had 1.5 billion users?

------
striking
Can someone summarize the plan that was revealed in this article? I'm far too
impatient to read the entire article. Is it the "we'll serve branded ads"
approach that we've heard about already? Not quite a reveal if that's the
case, as I'm fairly certain I found the ads on my own in the app already.

Cool app, though. Lots of fun. Snapchat's basically replaced texting for the
average-to-cooler kids at my high school. It used to be that the "cool kids"
would have unlimited texting, but now they just use Snapchat. I wonder what
they'll come up with next.

------
jitl
Aside from the article, I love BloombergBusiness's web design here. Bold, yet
easy to read. They're doing great work over there.

------
rokhayakebe
2B videos per day. Wow.

~~~
mcintyre1994
I read it as that for only US users too, insane.

------
downandout
The title is misleading. He doesn't reveal any secret plans here, he simply
"reveals" that he plans to turn it into a real business. Not exactly
newsworthy.

tl;dr: Evan Spiegel stole an idea for disappearing photos from a frat brother
and hit the viral lottery with it. He now hopes to monetize without alienating
his large and fickle userbase, but advertisers are thus far unimpressed with
the results.

------
rubiquity
Article is actually just an Evan Spiegel humpathon. There is little to no
information about Snapchat becoming a "real" business.

------
kisstheblade
Jesus, ads are again apparently the solution to everything... No, snapchat is
not going to replace tv ads for example, even though pimple faced teens use it
to send belfies.

But come on, are all these "startups" only capable of being yet another ad
platform? Whatsapp was revolutionary as they had no ads and actually made
money by, _gasp_ , charging the users for an excellent service (at a very
reasonable price).

------
paulhauggis
"He’s also incredibly secretive about his business plans and an unknown (and
arguably underestimated) figure in the intersecting gossip circles of Silicon
Valley and Hollywood. "

He's not "secretive". He doesn't have one. His plan (or lack of) was to get as
many people using the app as possible and then scramble to try to monetize it.

The issue, like every other person with a company like this, is that if there
is even a hint of commercialization, the users will jump to the next "cool"
thing.

Reddit is having the same problem. The original founders were lucky in that it
was bought out and they got their payout.

~~~
pen2l
> Reddit is having the same problem. The original founders were lucky in that
> it was bought out and they got their payout.

How is it having the same problem? I think it still has a decent shot at
monetizing. And, I don't think it's going anywhere soon... it's like Facebook
in its class, it's too entrenched, people are not going to move on to the next
thing so easily. I don't even know any serious contender to Reddit.

~~~
ljk
with the recent "scandal" with the CEO and her husband, a lot of reddit users
are moving to sites like [https://voat.co](https://voat.co)

~~~
amyjess
Voat is mostly being promoted by racists who are upset that they're being
banned from the default subs for posting hate speech there.

It says a lot when Voat's most vocal supporters on reddit are the populations
of /r/coontown, /r/conspiracy, and /r/antipozi (all very, very NSFL). The
first is an anti-black sub, the second is an antisemitic sub (yes,
antisemitic: everyone should read /r/isrconspiracyracist and
/r/topmindsofreddit), and the third is a Neo-Nazi sub.

~~~
ljk
interesting, didn't know voat was just as toxic, based on the many comments i
saw on reddit i thought it was really big

------
sschueller
By the time snapchat makes money Meerkat and Periscope will take a large user
base away.

The next thing is already here.

~~~
downandout
Snapchat vs Meerkat/Periscope is an apples and oranges conparison. The latter
apps are primarily used for broadcasting to the public, while the former is
primarily used for communicating privately between friends. They can co-exist,
however based on the app charts, Meerkat is already dead.

~~~
sjg007
does snapchat support live video streaming?

~~~
iLoch
More like FaceTime, just one to one.

