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Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

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Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#171

Post by morrbo »

irishbro wrote: post #163
brianwawok wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? How many ads will you watch before you dump the platform?

They could try introducing some filters you have to pay for. It might be tough surviving the initial backlash due to people expecting them to be free but as long as they keep releasing some free ones they should survive. The other problem is their demographic is a bit younger so might not have that much disposable income but that didn't deter them from releasing glasses that cost >$100. I think parents would be more…

IMO they really need to do a revenue share. Big influencers (think youtube style ad revenue) would make enough to move on to the platform. Smaller users would still get the occasional 5 bucks, enough to keep people interested. Yes they'd get spam, fraud, and all that good stuff. But honestly they need something different to facebook/instagram/whatever that's not some shitty hotdog

Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#172

Post by dagw »

mongodude wrote: post #164
base698 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could also be incompetence in regards to managing servers and load testing with laziness for not shutting down instances and ignorance of using reserved instances? Ahem, I mean it could be.

Hehe! You will be surprised how often this happens in best of the companies. A large fintech startup I work with had 5 GPU servers lying around idle before the CTO realized that they only need them while training the Machine Learning models and not during inference stage.

Been there. Remember getting a call from a data center I'd never heard of asking to speak to the old sysadmin who'd quit 18 month ago. They asked something about the rack of servers we had in their data center, I replied "what rack? what data center?" Turns out that 2-3 years previous the old sysadmin had set up a dozen servers in their data center for some project (that I'd never heard of) that very shortly afterwards first got pushed forwards and then canceled. Everybody involved in that project promptly moved on to other things and no remembered to cancel the deal with the data center. So for two years we'd been paying quite a lot of money to keep a completely idle rack of pretty expensive servers and apparently no one noticed.

Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#173

Post by tanilama »

lefstathiou wrote: post #76
Devolver wrote: post #46

Snap went from an incredible growth rate to a terrible growth rate because of a few simple (and sadly, quite common) strategic mistakes: 1. Underestimating the competition. Evan Spiegel clearly believed that Zuckerberg would never figure out how to beat him. He seems to have concluded that he was smarter, more creative, and more agile than Zuck. He profoundly miscalculated Zuck's relentlessness and is now losing badl…

I am fascinated by Facebook. It is one of the most valuable companies in the world but if you took it away from me (and I would argue most people) tomorrow morning it would have almost no impact on our day to day lives. I actively use it and my girlfriend is obsessed with Instagram but if she didnt have it she would just go back to reading blogs on Tumblr or wherever. I would hate to live in a world without Google or…

Messenger is huge. It is like utility that I won't even assume it is going away.

Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#175

Post by countryqt30 »

whathaschanged wrote: post #64

Everybody talks about the advantages of immediate cashflow, while always ignoring these outcomes. What did going public allow the company to do that it was unable to do prior to selling out? Did they just need the money to keep paying for bandwidth? Because that's the essence of the 1990s dot com game, with private venture capital being replaced by wall street investment firms. Unreasonable demands for 'projected gro…

They knew that the boom was over very quickly, so both the founders and investors wanted to cash out

Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#176

Post by speedplane »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #122
azinman2 wrote: post #69

“Excess inventory and related charges – In Q3 2017, we recorded $39.9 million of charges related to Spectacles inventory, primarily related to excess inventory reserves and inventory purchase commitment cancellation charges.“ Looks like spectacles was a failure.

I never saw anyone on the street with Spectacles and that signals to me it is a failure. I find this rule works for portable consumer electronics.

The biggest sign of failure to me was watching my girlfriends younger siblings switch from Snapchat to Instagram stories. They're getting eaten.

Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#177

Post by dagw »

jsemrau wrote: post #138
rock_hard wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally couldn’t disagree more. If you cut me off tomorrow of Facebook and Messeneger I would instantly loose contact to the majority of people I care about (except my wife and parents). I would end up spending life on my couch watching Netflix instead of engaging in a rich social life I have now thanks to FB events, groups, Messeneger, etc. And I guarantee you that’s true for a large amount of the user base! Ot…

That sounds really sad, to be honest. Where are you living that you can't have face to face interactions on a regular basis.

Making new real friends as an adult in an entirely new place is really hard for many people in many places (including me), and hanging out with vague acquaintances doesn't hold much interest.

Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#178

Post by speedplane »

kalessin wrote: post #117
donavanm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That cost is definitely not bandwidth. Content delivery is around $0.005-0.01 per GB with an external provider. Less if yiu have the scale to do it in house. My guess is that the bulk of that spend is compute + storage/io.

The cost is definitely bandwidth, Snapchat doesn't have much of a storage problem as snaps have an actual TTL.

I bet bandwidth is a large cost, but I bet compute is a big component too. Snapchat uses Google App Engine, an awesome platform but expensive (comparable to Heroku).

Regardless, my understanding is that Snap now gets some sort of flat rate deal from Google, so not sure how important the individual components are.

Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#179

Post by speedplane »

rgbrenner wrote: post #28
liquidise wrote: post #21

> Hosting costs per DAU were $0.68 in Q3 2017 as compared to $0.64 in Q3 2016 and $0.61 in Q2 2017. Those are staggering figures to me and the trend is equally surprising. Maybe it's ignorance about hosting costs at such a scale, but i feel like cost/DAU should be declining over time, right? Is there something i'm missing here?

They have to receive the picture, then send it to a number of other users. So it's probably mostly bandwidth charges. They use Google, right? When was the last time Google (or any of the cloud providers) lowered their bandwidth charges? That small fluctuation is probably just minor variations in usage.

For every user with the app open, they have to constantly calculate new information too send out, not just snaps but ads and news content. It's not mining bitcoin, but not trivial. Probably a few dozen database reads/writes per user every minute.

Re: Snap Inc. Third Quarter 2017 Results

#180

Post by speedplane »

dagw wrote: post #177
jsemrau wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds really sad, to be honest. Where are you living that you can't have face to face interactions on a regular basis.

Making new real friends as an adult in an entirely new place is really hard for many people in many places (including me), and hanging out with vague acquaintances doesn't hold much interest.

Totally agree that it's challenging to make new friends as an adult. I feel lucky if I make one new real friend every two years. But just cause it's hard doesn't make it impossible, and it's far more rewarding than internet-only friends... you can actually do things together, not just talk.
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