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Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat into a Real Business
- sschueller 11y agoBy the time snapchat makes money Meerkat and Periscope will take a large user base away. The next thing is already here.
- tashoecraft 11y agoReally? There was a lot of hype around Meerkat and Periscope for what felt like a weekend, and it has all but disappeared. I hated on Snapchat for awhile, but they have a very good audience now. Snapchat may very well fade out amongst teens and something new and shiny will grab their attention, but they seem to be doing pretty well. If their plans work out we could see some impressive numbers coming from them, whilst retaining their target demographic.
- downandout 11y agoSnapchat 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.
- minimaxir 11y agohttp://topsy.com/analytics?q1=%23meerkat&q2=%23periscope&via=Topsy http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=%23meerkat&q2=%23periscope&via... Meerkat is treading water, and due to the higher burn rate of 1-to-many video, even with $11M funding it will die out quickly. Periscope is doing better but not enough to justify a $100M acquisition. The spike is due to the piracy of the Mayweather boxing fight: if piracy becomes the sole use case and gets even more attention from content providers, both die immediately from the resulting lawsuits.
- iLoch 11y agoWell, not that I think video streaming services are going to go anywhere, but YouTube was primarily used for pirated content when it first came out too.
- minimaxir 11y agoCorrect, hence the very expensive and long lasting Viacom lawsuit. YouTube built ContentID as a way to handle piracy and stave off more lawsuits, which is a tool that video streaming startups cannot duplicate.
- kneel 11y agoThis company is worth 15B?
- cosarara97 11y agoSome 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).
- hnnewguy 11y ago>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 11y agoI 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 11y agoI'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 11y ago
- paulhauggis 11y ago"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.
- lstyls 11y ago> 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. Like what happened when Facebook monetized?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago"Facebook Was The One Network People Used Less In 2014" http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/01/27/facebook-active-users-decline/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/01/27/facebook-a... "Facebook’s ‘active’ users aren’t so active anymore, says survey data" http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/facebooks-active-users-arent-so-active-anymore-says-survey-data/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/facebooks-active-users-are...
- onewaystreet 11y agoFacebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, the apps that people are using more.
- paulhauggis 11y agoFacebook is selling your data. A site like Reddit and Snapchat don't have same sort of data to sell.
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- rubiquity 11y agoArticle is actually just an Evan Spiegel humpathon. There is little to no information about Snapchat becoming a "real" business.
- downandout 11y agoThe 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.
- kisstheblade 11y agoJesus, 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).
- coldtea 11y ago>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.
- rokhayakebe 11y ago2B videos per day. Wow.
- mcintyre1994 11y agoI read it as that for only US users too, insane.
- jitl 11y agoAside from the article, I love BloombergBusiness's web design here. Bold, yet easy to read. They're doing great work over there.
- wyc 11y agoTLDR 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.
- k-mcgrady 11y agoAlmost 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.
- pbiggar 11y agoCompletely agree. Spiegel came across as a douche once, but new CEOs learn incredibly quickly, esp when in charge of a 300+ person company with experienced help. I would guess he'll become a very good CEO (maybe he already is) and lead snapchat to an interesting and successful place. The product is certainly in a difficult space with finicky users, but those users are also extraordinarily valuable. No way to tell what will happen, wap if you're not in the demographic.
- onewaystreet 11y agoPeople generally have no vision, everything is either going to be a failure or was obvious.
- striking 11y agoI'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.
- baristaGeek 11y agoPG'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.
- Animats 11y agoTheir 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 11y agoif 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?
- MichaelGG 11y ago330 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 11y agoLarge 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.
- striking 11y agoCan 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.