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Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

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11–20 of 99 posts

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#11
Metrics exposed by instagram is a pure scam aka growth hacking by fb engineers as their comp is aligned towards that.

Snapchat: Stories are not autoplay. You touch and see the story you're interested in and the view closes. You have to scroll and open another story.

Instagram: Stories are autoplay. You click once and it's a slideshow. So you can assume metric here are orders of magnitude higher than what it should be.

Snapchat: Story introduced a new revenue source without affecting bottomline.

Instagram: Stories at the top of the app is a very bad user experience. If an users spends more time in story, he spends less time in scrolling instagram feed. (Nobody in Instagram wants to talk about that).

Snapchat: People post whenever they feel like posting. Instagram: People post when they feel something is of very high quality.

Snapchat: Doesn't want to grow the number of users as it doesn't matter to company's revenue. FB makes 75-80% of revenue with just it's 10-20% of users which snapchat already own.

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#12

Metrics exposed by instagram is a pure scam aka growth hacking by fb engineers as their comp is aligned towards that. Snapchat: Stories are not autoplay. You touch and see the story you're interested in and the view closes. You have to scroll and open another story. Instagram: Stories are autoplay. You click once and it's a slideshow. So you can assume metric here are orders of magnitude higher than what it should be…

Why would Snap not want to grow the number of users?

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#13
post #7
post #5

What do people think about "minutes per day" as a metric for success? I think it represents a fundamental misalignment of goals between users and the company. By this metric, the more of your waking life that can be taken, the better.

I don't get it. It's not like users are forced to use these applications. If users like Instagram more than Snapchat, they're bound to use it longer (which the article seems to imply). Hence, the metric.

> It's not like users are forced to use these applications.

Nowadays, everything in this line of business is designed to be addictive.

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#14
post #7
post #5

What do people think about "minutes per day" as a metric for success? I think it represents a fundamental misalignment of goals between users and the company. By this metric, the more of your waking life that can be taken, the better.

I don't get it. It's not like users are forced to use these applications. If users like Instagram more than Snapchat, they're bound to use it longer (which the article seems to imply). Hence, the metric.

See "Hooked" by Nir Eyal which is all about how to get people addicted to your product. Hence time glued to app metrics.

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#15
post #9
post #5

What do people think about "minutes per day" as a metric for success? I think it represents a fundamental misalignment of goals between users and the company. By this metric, the more of your waking life that can be taken, the better.

1) It's TechCrunch, so when you say "people", your talking about tech journalists. 2) Minutes per day is highly correlative to the amount of inventory of ads that you can display to users. More time spent on platform = more money you can potentially extract. Given that time is limited, there is only a finite amount available to competing platforms, so it is actually an interesting metric to track (it combines both op…

I'm not sure what you mean by point 3 -- it sounds like the reason for that misalignment, not the absence of one.

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#16

Metrics exposed by instagram is a pure scam aka growth hacking by fb engineers as their comp is aligned towards that. Snapchat: Stories are not autoplay. You touch and see the story you're interested in and the view closes. You have to scroll and open another story. Instagram: Stories are autoplay. You click once and it's a slideshow. So you can assume metric here are orders of magnitude higher than what it should be…

Why would Snap not want to grow the number of users?

You can think of it as Apple vs. Microsoft. You can have every desktop in the world and not make as much cash as Apple.

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#17
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Snap not want to grow the number of users?

You can think of it as Apple vs. Microsoft. You can have every desktop in the world and not make as much cash as Apple.

Except Snapchat is not making real money and less prospects to do so by the day

https://stratechery.com/2017/snaps-apple-strategy/

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#18
post #5

What do people think about "minutes per day" as a metric for success? I think it represents a fundamental misalignment of goals between users and the company. By this metric, the more of your waking life that can be taken, the better.

insta and snapchat aren't productivity apps, they're essentially time wasters. so yeah, minutes per day is a decent metric for success.

when Google Sheets starts bragging about their minutes per day metric then i'll start getting worried.

Re: Instagram daily use surpasses Snapchat

#19

Metrics exposed by instagram is a pure scam aka growth hacking by fb engineers as their comp is aligned towards that. Snapchat: Stories are not autoplay. You touch and see the story you're interested in and the view closes. You have to scroll and open another story. Instagram: Stories are autoplay. You click once and it's a slideshow. So you can assume metric here are orders of magnitude higher than what it should be…

Why would Snap not want to grow the number of users?

Apparently, Evan Spiegel has said they do not want to expand to poor countries like India and Spain. And he doesn't care so much about the Android version.

http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel-only-...

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