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People need to stop focusing their criticism on how stupid the app is or how they're going to lose all their users. It's almost a meme by now of how people say

People need to stop focusing their criticism on how stupid the app is or how they're going to lose all their users. It's almost a meme by now of how people say this every time Snapchat is brought up. By now it's a foregone conclusion, and requires active ignorance and not really caring to keep an open mind, to continue to hold onto that belief in the face of tremendous evidence that 1) Snapchat is very popular, 2) Snapchat has been around for 5 years now and hasn't gone anywhere, and 3) Users of Snapchat use it very actively. Personally, I think one good way to see why people use the product is to 1) be in a relationship, and 2) regularly send pictures of what you're doing / funny things you've encountered / your face, back and forth with your partner. Where I feel like there is legitimate criticism of Snapchat is their ability to monetize. Unlike Google, there is no purchasing intent. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, there is little ability to target users beyond age/gender/location (and no amount of computer vision in the short term will change that). Their Discover / Live products (which allow you to see snippets from brands / news channels / publishers) are promising but unlike the core product, I think there is legitimate reason to be doubtful about the appeal of these products because they have nothing to do with chatting with friends.

chubot 10y ago
Don't forget that lots of people said Facebook wasn't monetizable either, just a few years ago.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  Is Facebook or Twitter the better analogue to Snapchat? Twitter has revenues of around 600M per quarter but lost 80M as its growth stalls.
- mdorazio 10y ago
  I don't remember that. People thought that Facebook couldn't match Google-level ad revenue, but the monetization model was abundantly clear for Facebook as soon as it became obvious how much personal data they were tracking. Facebook IPO'd in 2012, at which point it already had over $4B in revenue, and had been generating revenue for years before that. The much better example is Twitter, which people did indeed say wasn't monetizable, still isn't profitable, and has absolutely tanked since its IPO.
  - richardking 10y ago
    There were lots of question on whether they could monetize on mobile when they IPO'd. I think their stock went down 33-50% from their IPO price until they showed they could make the transition. http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/07/27/facebook-struggles-with-monetizing-its-mobile-users/#1fd202f839a8 http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/07/27/fac...
  - gjolund 10y ago
    Exactly. All the data showed that Twitter wasn't monetizable, yet people still threw huge valuations at it. There is nothing wrong with building apps and platforms that don't have clear paths to monetization, I just don't see why any sane VC would ever invest in one.
    - the_watcher 10y ago
      Because good VCs make money on the ones that successfully monetize, not on consistent 10% ROI. That kind of return is great, but just be a PE firm if that's your goal.
      - gjolund 10y ago
        If you have the money to play the odds like that then more power to you. I just don't like the acknowledgement that most of their investments will fail.
        joslin01 10y ago
        Naw man, that's just how it goes in VC world. You have to play it like that. It's like a roulette table -- hard to hit a number but pays out 33x. Well, similarly, a very successful start-up can pay out 100-1000x and easily carry the other losers.
- technotony 10y ago
  The difference is that Facebook was within reach of cashflow positive at all times in it's growth, ie if they fired non-core staff could be cash flow positive within months (source: Mark Zuckerburg talk I went to). It had ad's from within the first few months of existence, that was Saverin's role before he left/was fired but they always built that part of the business and revenues always scaled with expenses.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vonklaus 10y ago
look, I am all for giving snapchat the benefit of the doubt (or I did a long time ago) it was actully the classic zuckerberg boardroom story peter theil tells all the time, except zuckerberg was yahoo to snapchat(i think yahoo was the aquirer but IDRP). Mark Zuckerberg was a the full package, a super talented developer and shrewd business man. Maybe he was cocky, maybe he was super clever, but he doubled down on himself because he knew his business, he knew his customers, he knew the product, and he mapped out the next 2-5 years in his head already. Snapchat turning him down was an echo of that enthusiasm and market knowledge. Quiet determinsim & with only that to go on, the market assumed it was a zuckerberg story: knowing much more than everyone else and being able to see the companies future. That was bold, and that took guts to do what snapchat did, and turn down money. However, facebook grew up in a totally different time. After 7 years facebook raised slightly less than this capital raise and it was just fundamentally a better/different company. But chiefly, Facebook's value materialized after this as Mark expected it to. By value, I mean on many levels. Snapchat's has not. The product hasn't evolved (again I don't use it, but apparently) very much. Facebook, adn the team stormed pictures, mobile, developer centric apis (becoming a core authentication cornerestone and identity tool), streamlining feed data, and matching algorithims. Snapchat, to a non-user, appears to fall flat in positive significant improvements. There seems to be one feature I have read about that is relatively new, that is universally hated. It is the only thing I have read about that seems like a departure from text messages I can never see again. First off, advertising revenue was super important and a semi-reasonable monetization strategy back then. Facebook had officially won the network effect social game. It was the beneficiary of the largest social network to exist, ever. Also, their content was aggregated and stored and has been for a decade. They have massive amounts of user data and a distribution network. You really can't replicate 5 years of content in a single place and a network that is ~1/10th the size of earth. Facebook is google for people, it is a search engine. Snapchat does not have a clear monetization strategy and the content they have is ephemeral. If a snapchat clone came out tomorrow, snapchat wouldn't be as sticky. Snapchat looks like twitter, the poster child for massive high engagement with disposable content and horrible biz fundamentals. In fact, twitter or facebook could clone snapchat probably super easy and enjoy crazy leverage and synergy. The only reason a 3rd unknown party can't is network penetration. The thing about twitter, is that it is a realtime sentiment protocol that allows data-mining by forcing humans to condense thoughts into a single data object called a tweet. Creating your own data transmission protocol and having end-to-end control of it has huge potential. They can distribute their api & data objects to news, politicians, entertainers, hedgefunds and also allow advertising and purchase execution. Uniting this data object with something like a hashtag allows them to track global trends. Where as Snapchat allows you to send dickpicks to horny girls you want to sleep with. So I am all for people trying to procreate and I have even had sex once or twice myself, but snapchat has a worse monetization strategy than twitter, and they really would need a facebook size IPO to pay back investors. FB raised 16B in a horribly botched IPO. That would 10x the last money in, which has probably horrifying ratchets and clawback clauses. So, an admittedly super popular app that has existed for 5 years doesn't justify a 16B ipo at 100+B in 2 years like facebook did unless they think they can charge like $1 like whatsapp did, but that proved to be shitty for them. Was that acq. worth it? IDK, but certainly no PE firm would do it, only a huge company based 100% on realtie social connectedness. I don't want to hate too hard, snapchat is cool (i don't use it myself) and many people find it a staple of their day. Especially trnedy demographics like postlennials. However, if my generation (millenials) is any indication, these kids are going to have way less money, be much less willing to pay, and came out of the womb with adblock, ublock and a propensity to jump around numerous social networks. edit: fossuser pointed out, which I had forgotten/totally missed, that post facebook/snapchat deal facebook did clone snapchat with poke in a 2 week sprint and spent the next 1.5 years hacking on it. It did fail, and they shunted the project. Here is the IBM advert fossuser was speaking about and the Evan Spiegal quote[0] [0]http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/snapchat-co-founder-evan-spiegel-responds-to-poke-welcome-facebook-seriously/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/snapchat-co-founder-evan-sp...
overcast 10y ago
I don't understand why use cases 1 and 2 wouldn't just send a text message picture. Why would you bother with a 3rd party app that erases them? With that said, that is probably the least percentage reason as to why people use it. The greatest being for sending half naked photos to strangers.
- andyfleming 10y ago
  Snapchat removes the hesitation about what you are sending. People don't worry about picture quality, etc. It's a temporary message. It really is about the content.
  - gjolund 10y ago
    Or lack thereof.
    - argonaut 10y ago
      Yes. By definition most people's day to day lives are average and not particularly special.
      - gjolund 10y ago
        I find conversations on snapchat annoy me in the same way as conversations with a needy attention seeking girlfriend. All the person wants is confirmation of existence, and most of the time they are not actually interested in a real conversation.
        argonaut 10y ago
        One wonders why you're even bothering to complain. You realize that fashion, entertainment, movies, video gaming, female modeling, male modeling, and so on probably collectively make up more than $1 trillion of the world economy?
        andyfleming 10y ago
milesokeefe 10y ago
Perhaps it doesn't scale well, but their sponsored face filters seem to be getting a good reception. It's rare for people to find ads fun.
- alexggordon 10y ago
  This. The sponsored filters show up in my friends stories all the time. I also see sponsored filters based on events and location. I actually find myself watching the sponsored stories pretty regularly too. It's a great way to fit news into small bitesized chunks, and I can't imagine the buy in for those is cheap.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  It's also the most widely used AR implementation - if somewhat trivial and non-complicated. It might seem silly from the outside, but that's actually meaningful because it gets people used to the idea of modifying the "real world" with a contextual addition.
- alttab 10y ago
  Fucking pissed me off to the max, actually. This week, they did X-Men lenses and REMOVED the face swap and picture swap features for the entire day. If I wanted to use lenses, it had to be X-Men for the whole day. What PM green-lit that shitty decision? I closed Snapchat and didn't use it for the entire day. I'm boycotting the X-Men movie out of protest.
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    Going a whole day without face/picture swap "pissed you off to the max"? Seems you have a pretty good life.
    - alttab 10y ago
      Pedantry is alive and well on hacker news
    - frankzinger 10y ago
downandout 10y ago
I actually see Discover as their only redeeming feature. The interface is fantastic for mobile. They should just publish a set of Discover tags that sites can use to format their content for it, and let people use Snapchat as a browser. As a messenger, it's...just another messenger.
- argonaut 10y ago
  Snapchat is not similar to any messenger I know of. There have been numerous failed attempts to clone Snapchat, however.
petercooper 10y ago
I'm a heavy Snapchat user and just sending stuff to a partner doesn't seem to be the main use case nowadays - it's stories (basically a video equivalent of Twitter and Instagram mushed together) or throwaway group sending.
- argonaut 10y ago
  Agreed, but most people won't understand stories until/unless they have a bunch of friends on Snapchat, so it's not the best aspect to start with.
- swombat 10y ago
  Hey Peter. What's the point of stories? Seems like a more limited version of Twitter - you can post photos and videos on twitter too... and there you have 21k followers. Surely a better place to post stuff if you want to reach an audience?
  - az0xff 10y ago
    It's mostly about the user experience of the follower, I think (more than the fact that the stories go away after 24 hours). Snapchat allows a follower to consume all of the stories that they follow in a single stream. You only have to tap quickly to go to the next media item. One can also skip one story and move on to the next with a single swipe. The fact that everything has to be a direct photo or video from a phone also makes every story feel less manufactured and more genuine. For example, I can go to an NBA player's Twitter account and find that personal tweets and messages from their sponsors are completely mixed in a single feed, while their Snapchat feed is all about their day-to-day personal life (which some find much more interesting).
    - skybrian 10y ago
      Interesting. So the key point is that you're encouraged to talk about yourself and not other people or things? It's the opposite of a link blog, which is what I mostly do; I don't consider my own life to be nearly as interesting to the audience (presumed to be mostly people I don't know) as interesting stuff I can find on the Internet.
shostack 10y ago
The monetization piece is interesting, because unlike FB, Snapchat has been all about privacy and anonymity from day one. Their recent ToS change makes it clear that this might not always be the case, and I'm really curious to see how their users react as they get more and more aggressive on monetization. The core functionality doesn't necessarily require the network effect to be useful, unlike Facebook, so there is theoretically less reason to stick around if the monetization ramp-up negatively impacts the user experience.
- mralvar 10y ago
  http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/ http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/ http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/fulldisclosure/ http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/fulldisclosure/ Really?
- gjolund 10y ago
  They store all the photos internally. This was confirmed to me by several snapchat employees while interviewing.
  - HappyTypist 10y ago
    Do you mean indefinitely? Are they not deleted after a certain period of time?
    - azinman2 10y ago
      Effectively they are deleted just not how you might imagine -- I can't reveal more as I'm not supposed to know this ;)
      - askafriend 10y ago
        They probably just batch delete them from time to time but until then do a soft delete by setting "status 0" in the DB. I imagine that's what they do.
      - feelix 10y ago
gjolund 10y ago
I don't think anyone is debating the popularity of Snapchat. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "I think there is legitimate reason to be doubtful about the appeal of these products because they have nothing to do with chatting with friends". In my opinion, when Snapchat is truly forced to monetize (such as twitter/fb after ipo) it will dillute the core product to the point that people will search for alternatives. At that point a competitor will get some VC funding after grabbing some users and start the cycle again. I view this behavior by SV to be just as damaging to the state of the tech industry as housing derivatives were to the housing industry.
- argonaut 10y ago
  I don't buy this scenario. The failure scenario I have in mind is their monetized products fail to catch on, and they are basically like Twitter - no other products that directly compete in that niche, but not a cash cow either. Or WhatsApp - very popular, not a cash cow.
  - gjolund 10y ago
    Just as plausible, if not more so. I just view the constantly aging 18-24 year old demographic as the main driver of viral growth these days. As that demographic ages out a new flavor of the week will emerge.
    - wrsh07 10y ago
      That would make sense if most high school students didn't currently use Snapchat
  - the_watcher 10y ago
    Common misconception: Twitter has actually pretty steadily increased its revenue per user. Their issue is that their user growth has basically plateaued far short of the ubiquitous level they need.
    - argonaut 10y ago
collyw 10y ago
The interns in our marketing department use it. I asked them to explain it to me, and they did. I still don't see the point in it. But everyone under the age of 25 does seems to see the point. And the advertising on it brings us business.

chubot 10y ago

Don't forget that lots of people said Facebook wasn't monetizable either, just a few years ago.

mikeryan 10y ago
Is Facebook or Twitter the better analogue to Snapchat? Twitter has revenues of around 600M per quarter but lost 80M as its growth stalls.
mdorazio 10y ago
I don't remember that. People thought that Facebook couldn't match Google-level ad revenue, but the monetization model was abundantly clear for Facebook as soon as it became obvious how much personal data they were tracking. Facebook IPO'd in 2012, at which point it already had over $4B in revenue, and had been generating revenue for years before that. The much better example is Twitter, which people did indeed say wasn't monetizable, still isn't profitable, and has absolutely tanked since its IPO.
- richardking 10y ago
  There were lots of question on whether they could monetize on mobile when they IPO'd. I think their stock went down 33-50% from their IPO price until they showed they could make the transition. http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/07/27/facebook-struggles-with-monetizing-its-mobile-users/#1fd202f839a8 http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/07/27/fac...
- gjolund 10y ago
  Exactly. All the data showed that Twitter wasn't monetizable, yet people still threw huge valuations at it. There is nothing wrong with building apps and platforms that don't have clear paths to monetization, I just don't see why any sane VC would ever invest in one.
  - the_watcher 10y ago
    Because good VCs make money on the ones that successfully monetize, not on consistent 10% ROI. That kind of return is great, but just be a PE firm if that's your goal.
    - gjolund 10y ago
      If you have the money to play the odds like that then more power to you. I just don't like the acknowledgement that most of their investments will fail.
      - joslin01 10y ago
        Naw man, that's just how it goes in VC world. You have to play it like that. It's like a roulette table -- hard to hit a number but pays out 33x. Well, similarly, a very successful start-up can pay out 100-1000x and easily carry the other losers.
technotony 10y ago
The difference is that Facebook was within reach of cashflow positive at all times in it's growth, ie if they fired non-core staff could be cash flow positive within months (source: Mark Zuckerburg talk I went to). It had ad's from within the first few months of existence, that was Saverin's role before he left/was fired but they always built that part of the business and revenues always scaled with expenses.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

vonklaus 10y ago

look, I am all for giving snapchat the benefit of the doubt (or I did a long time ago) it was actully the classic zuckerberg boardroom story peter theil tells all the time, except zuckerberg was yahoo to snapchat(i think yahoo was the aquirer but IDRP). Mark Zuckerberg was a the full package, a super talented developer and shrewd business man. Maybe he was cocky, maybe he was super clever, but he doubled down on himself because he knew his business, he knew his customers, he knew the product, and he mapped out the next 2-5 years in his head already. Snapchat turning him down was an echo of that enthusiasm and market knowledge. Quiet determinsim & with only that to go on, the market assumed it was a zuckerberg story: knowing much more than everyone else and being able to see the companies future. That was bold, and that took guts to do what snapchat did, and turn down money. However, facebook grew up in a totally different time. After 7 years facebook raised slightly less than this capital raise and it was just fundamentally a better/different company. But chiefly, Facebook's value materialized after this as Mark expected it to. By value, I mean on many levels. Snapchat's has not. The product hasn't evolved (again I don't use it, but apparently) very much. Facebook, adn the team stormed pictures, mobile, developer centric apis (becoming a core authentication cornerestone and identity tool), streamlining feed data, and matching algorithims. Snapchat, to a non-user, appears to fall flat in positive significant improvements. There seems to be one feature I have read about that is relatively new, that is universally hated. It is the only thing I have read about that seems like a departure from text messages I can never see again. First off, advertising revenue was super important and a semi-reasonable monetization strategy back then. Facebook had officially won the network effect social game. It was the beneficiary of the largest social network to exist, ever. Also, their content was aggregated and stored and has been for a decade. They have massive amounts of user data and a distribution network. You really can't replicate 5 years of content in a single place and a network that is ~1/10th the size of earth. Facebook is google for people, it is a search engine. Snapchat does not have a clear monetization strategy and the content they have is ephemeral. If a snapchat clone came out tomorrow, snapchat wouldn't be as sticky. Snapchat looks like twitter, the poster child for massive high engagement with disposable content and horrible biz fundamentals. In fact, twitter or facebook could clone snapchat probably super easy and enjoy crazy leverage and synergy. The only reason a 3rd unknown party can't is network penetration. The thing about twitter, is that it is a realtime sentiment protocol that allows data-mining by forcing humans to condense thoughts into a single data object called a tweet. Creating your own data transmission protocol and having end-to-end control of it has huge potential. They can distribute their api & data objects to news, politicians, entertainers, hedgefunds and also allow advertising and purchase execution. Uniting this data object with something like a hashtag allows them to track global trends. Where as Snapchat allows you to send dickpicks to horny girls you want to sleep with. So I am all for people trying to procreate and I have even had sex once or twice myself, but snapchat has a worse monetization strategy than twitter, and they really would need a facebook size IPO to pay back investors. FB raised 16B in a horribly botched IPO. That would 10x the last money in, which has probably horrifying ratchets and clawback clauses. So, an admittedly super popular app that has existed for 5 years doesn't justify a 16B ipo at 100+B in 2 years like facebook did unless they think they can charge like $1 like whatsapp did, but that proved to be shitty for them. Was that acq. worth it? IDK, but certainly no PE firm would do it, only a huge company based 100% on realtie social connectedness. I don't want to hate too hard, snapchat is cool (i don't use it myself) and many people find it a staple of their day. Especially trnedy demographics like postlennials. However, if my generation (millenials) is any indication, these kids are going to have way less money, be much less willing to pay, and came out of the womb with adblock, ublock and a propensity to jump around numerous social networks. edit: fossuser pointed out, which I had forgotten/totally missed, that post facebook/snapchat deal facebook did clone snapchat with poke in a 2 week sprint and spent the next 1.5 years hacking on it. It did fail, and they shunted the project. Here is the IBM advert fossuser was speaking about and the Evan Spiegal quote[0] [0]http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/snapchat-co-founder-evan-spiegel-responds-to-poke-welcome-facebook-seriously/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/snapchat-co-founder-evan-sp...

overcast 10y ago

I don't understand why use cases 1 and 2 wouldn't just send a text message picture. Why would you bother with a 3rd party app that erases them? With that said, that is probably the least percentage reason as to why people use it. The greatest being for sending half naked photos to strangers.

andyfleming 10y ago
Snapchat removes the hesitation about what you are sending. People don't worry about picture quality, etc. It's a temporary message. It really is about the content.
- gjolund 10y ago
  Or lack thereof.
  - argonaut 10y ago
    Yes. By definition most people's day to day lives are average and not particularly special.
    - gjolund 10y ago
      I find conversations on snapchat annoy me in the same way as conversations with a needy attention seeking girlfriend. All the person wants is confirmation of existence, and most of the time they are not actually interested in a real conversation.
      - argonaut 10y ago
        One wonders why you're even bothering to complain. You realize that fashion, entertainment, movies, video gaming, female modeling, male modeling, and so on probably collectively make up more than $1 trillion of the world economy?
      - andyfleming 10y ago

milesokeefe 10y ago

Perhaps it doesn't scale well, but their sponsored face filters seem to be getting a good reception. It's rare for people to find ads fun.

alexggordon 10y ago
This. The sponsored filters show up in my friends stories all the time. I also see sponsored filters based on events and location. I actually find myself watching the sponsored stories pretty regularly too. It's a great way to fit news into small bitesized chunks, and I can't imagine the buy in for those is cheap.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
It's also the most widely used AR implementation - if somewhat trivial and non-complicated. It might seem silly from the outside, but that's actually meaningful because it gets people used to the idea of modifying the "real world" with a contextual addition.
alttab 10y ago
Fucking pissed me off to the max, actually. This week, they did X-Men lenses and REMOVED the face swap and picture swap features for the entire day. If I wanted to use lenses, it had to be X-Men for the whole day. What PM green-lit that shitty decision? I closed Snapchat and didn't use it for the entire day. I'm boycotting the X-Men movie out of protest.
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
  Going a whole day without face/picture swap "pissed you off to the max"? Seems you have a pretty good life.
  - alttab 10y ago
    Pedantry is alive and well on hacker news
  - frankzinger 10y ago

downandout 10y ago

I actually see Discover as their only redeeming feature. The interface is fantastic for mobile. They should just publish a set of Discover tags that sites can use to format their content for it, and let people use Snapchat as a browser. As a messenger, it's...just another messenger.

argonaut 10y ago
Snapchat is not similar to any messenger I know of. There have been numerous failed attempts to clone Snapchat, however.

petercooper 10y ago

I'm a heavy Snapchat user and just sending stuff to a partner doesn't seem to be the main use case nowadays - it's stories (basically a video equivalent of Twitter and Instagram mushed together) or throwaway group sending.

argonaut 10y ago
Agreed, but most people won't understand stories until/unless they have a bunch of friends on Snapchat, so it's not the best aspect to start with.
swombat 10y ago
Hey Peter. What's the point of stories? Seems like a more limited version of Twitter - you can post photos and videos on twitter too... and there you have 21k followers. Surely a better place to post stuff if you want to reach an audience?
- az0xff 10y ago
  It's mostly about the user experience of the follower, I think (more than the fact that the stories go away after 24 hours). Snapchat allows a follower to consume all of the stories that they follow in a single stream. You only have to tap quickly to go to the next media item. One can also skip one story and move on to the next with a single swipe. The fact that everything has to be a direct photo or video from a phone also makes every story feel less manufactured and more genuine. For example, I can go to an NBA player's Twitter account and find that personal tweets and messages from their sponsors are completely mixed in a single feed, while their Snapchat feed is all about their day-to-day personal life (which some find much more interesting).
  - skybrian 10y ago
    Interesting. So the key point is that you're encouraged to talk about yourself and not other people or things? It's the opposite of a link blog, which is what I mostly do; I don't consider my own life to be nearly as interesting to the audience (presumed to be mostly people I don't know) as interesting stuff I can find on the Internet.

shostack 10y ago

The monetization piece is interesting, because unlike FB, Snapchat has been all about privacy and anonymity from day one. Their recent ToS change makes it clear that this might not always be the case, and I'm really curious to see how their users react as they get more and more aggressive on monetization. The core functionality doesn't necessarily require the network effect to be useful, unlike Facebook, so there is theoretically less reason to stick around if the monetization ramp-up negatively impacts the user experience.

mralvar 10y ago
http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/ http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/ http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/fulldisclosure/ http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/fulldisclosure/ Really?
gjolund 10y ago
They store all the photos internally. This was confirmed to me by several snapchat employees while interviewing.
- HappyTypist 10y ago
  Do you mean indefinitely? Are they not deleted after a certain period of time?
  - azinman2 10y ago
    Effectively they are deleted just not how you might imagine -- I can't reveal more as I'm not supposed to know this ;)
    - askafriend 10y ago
      They probably just batch delete them from time to time but until then do a soft delete by setting "status 0" in the DB. I imagine that's what they do.
    - feelix 10y ago

gjolund 10y ago

I don't think anyone is debating the popularity of Snapchat. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "I think there is legitimate reason to be doubtful about the appeal of these products because they have nothing to do with chatting with friends". In my opinion, when Snapchat is truly forced to monetize (such as twitter/fb after ipo) it will dillute the core product to the point that people will search for alternatives. At that point a competitor will get some VC funding after grabbing some users and start the cycle again. I view this behavior by SV to be just as damaging to the state of the tech industry as housing derivatives were to the housing industry.

argonaut 10y ago
I don't buy this scenario. The failure scenario I have in mind is their monetized products fail to catch on, and they are basically like Twitter - no other products that directly compete in that niche, but not a cash cow either. Or WhatsApp - very popular, not a cash cow.
- gjolund 10y ago
  Just as plausible, if not more so. I just view the constantly aging 18-24 year old demographic as the main driver of viral growth these days. As that demographic ages out a new flavor of the week will emerge.
  - wrsh07 10y ago
    That would make sense if most high school students didn't currently use Snapchat
- the_watcher 10y ago
  Common misconception: Twitter has actually pretty steadily increased its revenue per user. Their issue is that their user growth has basically plateaued far short of the ubiquitous level they need.
  - argonaut 10y ago

collyw 10y ago

The interns in our marketing department use it. I asked them to explain it to me, and they did. I still don't see the point in it. But everyone under the age of 25 does seems to see the point. And the advertising on it brings us business.