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Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

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Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#91

Post by nemothekid »

randoman wrote: post #71
nemothekid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Snaps core demo likely doesn’t have the discretionary income to pay for a social network. 2. Snaps main competitor would have a far lower barrier to entry - free 3. If all your friends can’t pay for Snap, you will likely move regardless if you are a paying customer. Why would I pay for a network with 80% of my friends when I can use a near clone with 100% of my friends. 4. Facebook nearly $7/user a month with an a…

Snap's ARPU is about $1 per quarter. Surely the core demo can afford even a 100% markup on that? My problem with any ad model is it incentivises the maximisation of views/engagement that allow for more/stickier ad impressions which means a proliferation of viral/tabloid/divisive content like youtube/snap/facebook. Once that incentive can be minimised, the incentive to provide quality product that users then feel will…

Lets skip the fact that a your average 17yo may not even have a credit card to begin with.

If Snap were to start charging tomorrow, what would their value ad / sales pitch be?

The original reason people used Snap was ephemeral communication with their friends. Snap can't "sell" that. If I buy the Snap App, and my friends aren't there then the app is useless to me. The smaller the network is, the less valuable it is to me - and if I do buy in, it then becomes my job to also convince my friends that Snap is worth is paying for. If one of my friends does not renew their subscription, the value of the service to me also declines. I don't think any social network can be viable by subscription - the most valuable part of a social network is the network, and the under a subscription fee, "Snap" would always have to choose between making the network for valuable and generating revenue.

Thats why the ad model works so well for social networks. The more people you have, the more attractive it is to consumers as well as advertisers. This is different from something like a news publisher - the amount of people also reading from that same publisher doesn't affect my enjoyment of their content.

Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#92

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

leroy_masochist wrote: post #79
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There seems to be a hard boundary with reaching the demographic of users in developed nations and both Snap and Twitter are there I think Twitter and snap are very different. Snap is a messenger app and has the same potential as FB messenger or wechat. Twitter will never be that. The latest news has Tencent making a strategic investment and bringing chinese style monetization to Snapchat. I'm very optimistic about…

Interesting, what is Chinese style monetization?

Games, payment, micro-transactions.

Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#94

Post by dboreham »

timthelion wrote: post #83
dpandya wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of other models could potentially work for Snapchat other than advertising? I don't see any candidates from the list of other companies that serve young consumers.

I would create an extension to the snap ecosystem, which would be called "snap graffiti". Snap graffiti would allow you to attach a geographic location to a picture. These pictures could be anything, and anyone could see the pictures by being near the location. They would only hang on to the location for a certain amount of time. This in and of itself is not a business plan. But I would then allow these pictures to b…

Bored teen cuts finger on metal. Parent sues you and Snapchat.

Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#95

Post by anindha »

It took Facebook and Google a while to nail their advertising strategies. FB shares dropped down from an IPO price of $38 to less than $20 at one point.

Its a very competitive climate and Snapchat needs to keep innovating, but I wouldn't write Snapchat off too early.

Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#96

Post by soVeryTired »

adventured wrote: post #77
cft wrote: post #36

That means that FB was probably the last "web" or "app" big IPO. Now it's Amazon, Google or Facebook. Even Yelp is withering. Just like it has been impossible to start a new car or airliner manufacturer since the 1920s (except for Tesla), the opportunity for creating new large web companies has been shut by the entrenched trio.

You're radically exaggerating. Yelp? I don't see how that's a particularly good example. Priceline is 27 times their size in market cap. Let's examine that withering though. Yelp sales by year: 2014: $377 million 2015: $549 million 2016: $713 million 2017: likely ~$850 million Is that massive growth what qualifies as withering these days? How about Zillow? Tracking to $1 billion in sales, growing very nicely still. E…

I don't disagree that it's possible to beat the big three, but even prior to the snap IPO, the tech market felt a bit bubbly. There will be some big losers in your list too. It's worth saving this comment for posterity.

Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#97

Post by username223 »

traek wrote: post #44
username223 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3bn what? I still "use" it in some sense, but I mostly publish auto-syndicated stuff, and read via mbasic, which uses no JavaScript and limits their surveillance. Of course I never load their "like" buttons. My parents found it useless and stopped using it; my kids can't be bothered. How much is Myspace 2.0 worth?

3 billion monthly active users. They hit 2 billion this summer [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15880494/facebook-2-billi...

> 3 billion monthly active users.

I was trying to suggest that a lot of those "users" are not sources of income/data. I'll bet a lot of them are either bots, or humans smart enough to use an ad blocker. And most of the MAU humans are probably in a 10-year age range, having signed up when FB was useful.

Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#98

Post by dboreham »

tinbucket wrote: post #9
deftturtle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat is very confusing and poorly designed. 100% agree with you on the intuition part. But I don't think spectacles really has much influence on future of company; that is, Snapchat will fail or succeed for other reasons entirely. It might look expensive on paper, but the glasses project is more of a marketing stunt than a mass market product. If people don't want to use Snapchat, they won't use a device that is…

> and it's got the sexual harassment aspect, > too. Many many female friends of > mine receive unwanted dick pics. Same here. If I was in charge of Snapchat I'd be working on some way of automatically identifying and killing those images in-flight, and banning people who sent them repeatedly.

I think you just killed the goose..

Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#99

Post by TylerE »

cft wrote: post #36

That means that FB was probably the last "web" or "app" big IPO. Now it's Amazon, Google or Facebook. Even Yelp is withering. Just like it has been impossible to start a new car or airliner manufacturer since the 1920s (except for Tesla), the opportunity for creating new large web companies has been shut by the entrenched trio.

> start a new car or airliner manufacturer since the 1920s (except for Tesla

  Porsche (1931)
  Nissan (1933)
  Volkswagen (1937)
  Toyota (1937)
  Kia (1944)
  Hyundai (1947)
  Honda (1948)
  Land Rover (1948)
  SEAT (1950)
  Lotus (1952)
  Subaru (1953)
  Lamborghini (1963)
  Dozens of Chinese companies in recent years...
On the aero side:

  Antonov (1946)
  Embraer (1969)
  Airbus (1970)
  Diamond (1981)
  ATR (1981)
  Cirrus (1984)
  Bombardier (1989)
These lists are very far from inclusive.

Re: Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

#100

Post by jehlakj »

exogeny wrote: post #30

Snap suffers from a fundamental paradox, one that is difficult for me to imagine an easy way to solve. They've made their bones by being a uniquely fun and social way of a certain subset of the population to share their lives without parents dipping their head in and seeing what they're doing, ala Facebook. The UI is designed to generally support this; it is confusing and messy and understandable only by someone who…

UX in the context of their target audience is simple, elegant and concise. Young people have an easy time getting used to different gestures and their respective actions. And once you get used to it (it took me a while cause I’m a bit old), it’s super convenient.
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