4 ms·

"server costs" (Google Cloud) is an affordable $450 million per year commitment. They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the use

by us0r 9y ago

"server costs" (Google Cloud) is an affordable $450 million per year commitment. They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the user base). My favorite part: "Spiegel laughed out loud when asked if he was worried about Facebook copying his features. “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google."" We'll check back in a year to see if he feels the same way.

elefanten 9y ago
Also, Yahoo had the search box before Google. So, his analogy is actually perfect: Facebook will wreck him.
- princeb 9y ago
  snapchat is yahoo v2? snapchat rejects 3bn buyout... yahoo rejects 45bn buyout. how far can it go?
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Yahoo!'s market cap is above $45B and Snapchat is far above $3B and will be for years.
olegkikin 9y ago
$450M/year to support 160M daily actives seems insane. That's $2.81 per user per year. That's like paying $234/month in hosting alone for 1K daily actives. What is all that computing power used for?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
theprop 9y ago
How many people does it take to make a photograph disappear? 2360 if you're Snapchat!
- nebabyte 9y ago
  Streisand and Beyonce could've used them.
acchow 9y ago
What are all those employees doing if Google is solving most of their scaling problems?
sorenjan 9y ago
> They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the user base). I don't understand what all these people do all day. Same with Twitter, they have 3860 employees according to their website. It seems like 10X as many as needed. I've worked in a few offices with less than 100 employees total, and while I have no idea what it takes to run a service with that much traffic, Snapchat runs on Google's cloud service. > “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google."" Maybe it will be a classic in the same genre as Ballmers answer to what he thought about Apple's new product the iPhone.
- ithinkinstereo 9y ago
  A large % of that number is in sales. Unfortunately B2B sales is still very much people driven. Lots of calls, emails, meetings x 10 until you close.
mrep 9y ago
Don't forget that they also signed a contract with AWS for a billion over the next 5 years: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/snap-commits-spend-1b-amazon-web-services-next-five-years/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/snap-commits-spend-1b-amazon-w...
tim333 9y ago
>"server costs" (Google Cloud) is an affordable $450 million per year That's interesting. I was curious how their choice to use Google App Engine would work out. It's reputation is easy to start with but expensive to run and some other issues. https://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spending-2-billion-google-cloud https://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-s... I wonder if they would have done better with a stack like WhatsApp - Erlang running on their own servers. Or even switching over to that in the future. I think WhatsApp at 500m users had about 35 engineers and 550 servers and so costs maybe 10% of Snap's. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
- eldavido 9y ago
  Bandwidth will almost certainly be their dominant economic input. It's funny, a lot of people think you exit AWS/GCE to rack your own machines, but I was on a datacenter tour in SV a few years back and was reminded that having fine-grained control of your network is just as a big a reason to do it. Adtech/finance do this all the time to control latency, I imagine it's also a consideration for Snap. I wonder if they'll ever build a CDN. It's probably not the right traffic pattern without a lot of re-sharing, but still, I could see it.

by us0r 9y ago

elefanten 9y ago

Also, Yahoo had the search box before Google. So, his analogy is actually perfect: Facebook will wreck him.

princeb 9y ago
snapchat is yahoo v2? snapchat rejects 3bn buyout... yahoo rejects 45bn buyout. how far can it go?
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Yahoo!'s market cap is above $45B and Snapchat is far above $3B and will be for years.

olegkikin 9y ago

$450M/year to support 160M daily actives seems insane. That's $2.81 per user per year. That's like paying $234/month in hosting alone for 1K daily actives. What is all that computing power used for?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

theprop 9y ago

How many people does it take to make a photograph disappear? 2360 if you're Snapchat!

nebabyte 9y ago
Streisand and Beyonce could've used them.

acchow 9y ago

What are all those employees doing if Google is solving most of their scaling problems?

sorenjan 9y ago

> They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the user base). I don't understand what all these people do all day. Same with Twitter, they have 3860 employees according to their website. It seems like 10X as many as needed. I've worked in a few offices with less than 100 employees total, and while I have no idea what it takes to run a service with that much traffic, Snapchat runs on Google's cloud service. > “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google."" Maybe it will be a classic in the same genre as Ballmers answer to what he thought about Apple's new product the iPhone.

ithinkinstereo 9y ago
A large % of that number is in sales. Unfortunately B2B sales is still very much people driven. Lots of calls, emails, meetings x 10 until you close.

mrep 9y ago

Don't forget that they also signed a contract with AWS for a billion over the next 5 years: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/snap-commits-spend-1b-amazon-web-services-next-five-years/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/snap-commits-spend-1b-amazon-w...

tim333 9y ago

>"server costs" (Google Cloud) is an affordable $450 million per year That's interesting. I was curious how their choice to use Google App Engine would work out. It's reputation is easy to start with but expensive to run and some other issues. https://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spending-2-billion-google-cloud https://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-s... I wonder if they would have done better with a stack like WhatsApp - Erlang running on their own servers. Or even switching over to that in the future. I think WhatsApp at 500m users had about 35 engineers and 550 servers and so costs maybe 10% of Snap's. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

eldavido 9y ago
Bandwidth will almost certainly be their dominant economic input. It's funny, a lot of people think you exit AWS/GCE to rack your own machines, but I was on a datacenter tour in SV a few years back and was reminded that having fine-grained control of your network is just as a big a reason to do it. Adtech/finance do this all the time to control latency, I imagine it's also a consideration for Snap. I wonder if they'll ever build a CDN. It's probably not the right traffic pattern without a lot of re-sharing, but still, I could see it.