There have been a few issues with how Facebook has calculated some of their views as well so it's not surprising that there maybe issues with Snapchat. But reg

There have been a few issues with how Facebook has calculated some of their views as well so it's not surprising that there maybe issues with Snapchat. But regardless of whether they are misquoting some of their growth numbers or not I think even without that they are going to have a difficult time with their valuation and IPO. They are already at $25B in the private market and with an IPO investors would be hoping for at least $40-50B. To justify that price just look at some of the companies in that range and the amount of revenue and growth they have in order to justify it. Snapchat is not a ubiquitous service like Facebook so ultimately it's going to be in a category somewhere between Twitter and Instagram. Instagram has one of the easiest on-boarding processes and with their static stream from friends that are now directly hooked into FB you are immediately immersed in what the experience is. Snapchat is a bit more complex. Regardless to justify a $50B valuation they are going to need a substantial revenue growth story with no hiccups. And they are ultimately going to have to prove out to about $2.5B of revenue in 2017 which is impossible. Comparatively speaking FB IPO'd for $100B in 2012 and had $5.2B in revenue for that fiscal year and also don't forget that it lost about 30% of it's value after IPO before rebounding substantially and their revenue growth and profitability has been world class. So I'm not looking at Snapchat with a commentary on it's product, but simply from a financial perspective and it's hard to create a story that validates their $40B-50B IPO target that they are most likely shooting for.