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Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

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Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#231
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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

snapchat is yahoo v2?

snapchat rejects 3bn buyout... yahoo rejects 45bn buyout. how far can it go?

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I both. Facebook numbers have been a scam for a long time. I look at most social media as I look at multilevel marketing... it's all sunshine and rainbows until it simply collapses. There are no 100 year businesses in social.

I think you're severely underestimating the scale and reach of Facebook. There's a reason it's a ~450B company. It really does have that many users. Even if a solid 20% of them are all fake accounts (which I don't think the percentage is that high), it's still a large part of the connected world. There's a reason Facebook is developing technology to bring the rest of the unconnected world online. It's because they kn…

So, that valuation means that's the money that facebook will make over its lifetime. Where do you see those revenues coming from?

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#234
really a net loss of two million on a revenue of 167000. that revenue is way too low for a company with global reach. a single person can make that much. my 'revenue' was 40k ish but at least i'm making a profit. so i'd be a better 'investment' than snapchat. sorry investors, currently not raising capital. literally anybody can do better than this. they will go the way of the dodo pretty soon.

ah ok...just saw that. dollars in thousands. that's slightly better but not really. my rating for this stock remains 'dodo'.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#235
post #42

I almost wonder if there's going to be a "liked it before it was cool" paradox to a lot of these social sharing startups dreams of continued user growth and eventual profitability. Facebook seems to have reached escape velocity as a quasi public utility, a ubiquitous enough communication medium that almost everyone is peer pressured into using it even though they increasing dislike it. But the other social sharing pl…

I get your point but that seems like a bad example to me. If the startup is the local indie band that makes it big then yeah, maybe they lose the trendy first users, but presumably they "made it" and are far more profitable by staying on the radio, even if they lose the few original fans.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#236
post #56
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think that investors are concern about net loss - at least I'm not. I'm disappointed by anemic growth: Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year. They have ~2B users [1] This q Snapchat had growth of ~5% which will be about ~20% per year. But they are 10x smaller than Facebook. [1] Facebook 5/3/17 earning report

>Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year. They have ~2B users. That's nearly 2/3 of people on the planet with Internet connections, according to estimates by the ITU (approx 3B internet users by the end of 2016) [0]. Even if I believed that user figure, which I dont, there is no way Facebook can grow at the same rate for much longer. [0] http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFa...

When Facebook can't grow anymore they will have proven retention, which relates to growth like learning to walk relates to learning to crawl.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#237
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to forget that for many, many users in emerging markets, the mobile carriers offer free data for WhatsApp. Traveling through Colombia, and I can use WhatsApp status for free over here. SnapChat kills my data.

Which is a really bad thing for net neutrality...

I was about to write the same thing. Here in Sweden you often see adverts for telcos where they offer free data for Facebook usage and stuff like that. We're not a developing country and you'll get a fair bit of data at a reasonable cost here, so it's perhaps not as obvious how this skews things in favour of the big players, but it's there alright, and it's sad.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#238
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's gonna be hard to find innovation when purchasing and cloning are the way to do business. Welcome to Microsoft circa 1990. People forget how much oxygen Microsoft could suck out of a space simply by mentioning they were going to develop something.

Or, as I mentioned (and got downvoted for yesterday), Google can. This is a very scary situation, where patents were originally developed to prevent exactly this.

I agree, but what can we do? Snap Inc. isn't exactly some teenager trying to make it out of their parent's garage. Patents obviously don't work, or at least not in their current form – troll litigation should suffice as proof of that – and besides, the big co's can just as well have departments doing nothing but patent all-the-things.

As so many like to say: they idea matters less than the speed and strength of execution. It's clear that the network effects of Facebook makes it very difficult to compete, but is the problem really that they are copying features from other products, or is that just the symptoms of a bigger issue?

Facebook effectively has a monopoly on the digital social network, no matter how many millennials say it's "not cool anymore" – they're still on it.

My personal hypothesis is that this is because we lack a decentralized identity feature on the internet. For better or worse, Facebook and Google solved that problem, and now everything you do is connected to either your Facebook account or gmail. It doesn't matter if you don't have those accounts, becasue everyone else does, more or less, and they're locked in. You can't bring your identity with you. Sure you can close your account and possibly download your data, but if you do that you sever the connections, which is the true valuable bit of the network – the nodes less so.

I really don't like the sheer dominance of Google and Facebook, but I have no idea how to get away from it either. Makes me small just thinking about it.

Re: Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results

#240
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not hate and you may well be right about the scale and reach of facebook right now. However, I think many people over-estimate the real utility of Facebook. That is, lives would not materially change for the better or worse if facebook fell off the face of the internet tomorrow, imo. Emotional reactions aside, Gajendra from Nepal and Tom from California would continue with life as they did before Facebook was a…

For a large portion of the population, Facebook IS the web. You say it adds no value. I say it adds a ton: Facebook is their Google. Without "a google" - something to make sense of this mess of trillions of pages, the web is damn useless. Google might be your Google, but Facebook is their Google, and becoming more people's Google every day. Sure, you can slot another company into Facebook. But you could do the same f…

Most importantly, Facebook is the small town local web that never really happened anywhere. Or rather: that happened everywhere, but only exactly once, being outdated ever since, complete with mandatory "under construction" gifs and a forum where the last post is an advertisement for some polyphonic ringtone scam.
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