The thing is, everyone says it's a 'fad' yet look at Twitter and Facebook--a decade later and still going strong. There is something about web 2.0 that makes it immune to the boom and bust cycle that beset web 1.0 companies (like Myspace, Aol, Yahoo, etc). Everyone seems to be using it..and the mobile rich media makes it ideal for advertisers, who pay a lot for those ads
Twitter still going strong? Check the latest news on that. What's interesting about the tech scene and Snapchat right now is that there are a lot of popular startups/apps, but only some are wildly successful while others are struggling to make money. There isn't a 1:1 correlation between popularity or number of users and profit.
> ... and the mobile rich media makes it ideal for advertisers, who pay a lot for those ads
Until they don't. At some point, the companies making actual stuff that people use will realize that, despite the made-up "metrics," there's not much value in surveillance-based advertising. It's hardly better than the pile of paper you transfer from your mailbox to your recycle bin every day.
