Snap falls to IPO price • Hacker News Board

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#191

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:14 AM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #92

skinnymuch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fb also bought IG at their IPO time and WhatsApp 2 years later. Both combined should be worth over $100B today. Compared to the roughly $20B spent. Obviously FB is still worth over $300B if we hypothetically chop $100B off. Far above IPO still. Just saying that FB had multiple things go very well for them to go from merely profitable at IPO to being the giant it is now -- mainly mobile exploding, but other things too…

Google Plus was a very real competitor when they launched (right around the time of Facebook's IPO), it was a very similar situation to that of Snapchat vs Instagram. Huge user growth very quickly, but most of it due to it being attached to Gmail. Not saying Instagram won't remain a real competitor to Snapchat, but it's possible that over time users will go back to their previous habits. Personally, I never post anyt…

[deleted]

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#192

Post by skinnymuch » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:17 AM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #92

skinnymuch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fb also bought IG at their IPO time and WhatsApp 2 years later. Both combined should be worth over $100B today. Compared to the roughly $20B spent. Obviously FB is still worth over $300B if we hypothetically chop $100B off. Far above IPO still. Just saying that FB had multiple things go very well for them to go from merely profitable at IPO to being the giant it is now -- mainly mobile exploding, but other things too…

Google Plus was a very real competitor when they launched (right around the time of Facebook's IPO), it was a very similar situation to that of Snapchat vs Instagram. Huge user growth very quickly, but most of it due to it being attached to Gmail. Not saying Instagram won't remain a real competitor to Snapchat, but it's possible that over time users will go back to their previous habits. Personally, I never post anyt…

Google+ wasn't real user growth. The number of active users was high because of such a weak definition reeking of BS.

The actual engagement rate was always weak (I'm defining it as purposefully reading or posting to google+).

Within a couple months, it was essentially nothing. I don't think Google+ ever sniffed 100M monthly active users after the initial two months of going completely public and having the hype. I'd think if it was 9 figures in active uses for the first few months, it was because a majority of people tried it once or twice or just did the Google+ profile creation. This is big because it means Google+ was never a real competitor in terms of popularity.

Google+ never felt like a threat at all to FB. And within a few months of public availablity, didn't seem like a threat of being a prominent social network behind FB either.

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#193

Post by dntrkv » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:17 AM UTC

sbov wrote: post #139

dntrkv wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Plus was a very real competitor when they launched (right around the time of Facebook's IPO), it was a very similar situation to that of Snapchat vs Instagram. Huge user growth very quickly, but most of it due to it being attached to Gmail. Not saying Instagram won't remain a real competitor to Snapchat, but it's possible that over time users will go back to their previous habits. Personally, I never post anyt…

Google Plus was a last ditch effort by a company to get, and keep, any kind of foothold in a market that they continually failed at. It was to my knowledge, at the very least, their fourth attempt (Orkut, open social, Google Buzz, Google Plus... am I missing one?). Calling it a "very real competitor" seems a bit overstated.

Like my comment below states, Google Plus grew to 30M users in their first month and 90M by the end of the year. During this time they were considered a real competitor and many people were predicting that they could dethrone Facebook and that there is nothing that says another competitor won't come along and do to Facebook what they did to Myspace.

Sure, looking back now it's easy to say Google Plus was a failure, but at the time people were really excited about it. Check out this graph of their growth:

And again, the reason for my post is that I wanted to point out there were people worried about competitors taking away market share from Facebook during their IPO just like there are people worried about competitors to Snapchat. It's only now that it's easy to discount those competitors because we see how it played out, at the time people were really excited about it, check out this graph: http://i.imgur.com/yQU2Y2z.jpg

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#194

Post by skinnymuch » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:23 AM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #92

skinnymuch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fb also bought IG at their IPO time and WhatsApp 2 years later. Both combined should be worth over $100B today. Compared to the roughly $20B spent. Obviously FB is still worth over $300B if we hypothetically chop $100B off. Far above IPO still. Just saying that FB had multiple things go very well for them to go from merely profitable at IPO to being the giant it is now -- mainly mobile exploding, but other things too…

Google Plus was a very real competitor when they launched (right around the time of Facebook's IPO), it was a very similar situation to that of Snapchat vs Instagram. Huge user growth very quickly, but most of it due to it being attached to Gmail. Not saying Instagram won't remain a real competitor to Snapchat, but it's possible that over time users will go back to their previous habits. Personally, I never post anyt…

My comment got too long and are two different responses. Splitting seems to make sense.

--

IG is around 725M monthly active users now. I think their DAU is roughly 450M. A year ago, they were at around 500M MAU.

Snapchat is at 170M DAU. It was at 145M DAU in August 2016. It is now at roughly 330 MAU and 290 MAU in August 2016 (I know they were at ~300 MAU in November 2016).

IG is outpacing Snapchat by percentage of growth on top of sheer numbers while being far far larger, of course benefitting from being around longer. Snapchat has always been the underdog to Instagram.

There's no comparison of Google+ to FB in 2012 and Instagram to Snapchat in 2017 or any of the last few years. With IG always having been larger than Snap and recent user growth of IG massively outperforming Snap too -- "users will go back to to their previous habits" doesn't fit here or in Google+'a case.

There are likely few people who switched from Snapchat to just IG in recent months while treating it like Snapchat (mostly DMing and doing stories) outside of bigger online names using IG stories. There's nothing to reverse of going back to old habits. Meanwhile with Google+, it never even became a habit. Most people never really used it. It was a one or two off thing for the vast majority of users, mostly perpetrated by the pushing of existing users to try Google+.

If your point was about people going back to Snapchat stories over IG stories, I'm not so sure. Just like you, friends still mostly post to Snap stories. IG for me is like 10% of friends or acquaintances posting regular stories. But a ton of people popular accounts posting. I don't see this changing. So IG stories will also always be bigger than Snapchat if current trends stick.

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#195

Post by chimeracoder » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:38 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #187

chimeracoder wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems like a pretty good reason to auction the shares in order to maximize the amount of money the company takes in. That they very rarely do has always seemed kind of dirty to me. There's nothing dirty about it. Public investors prefer to have a single price, because that's, well, how public markets generally operate after an IPO. They don't want to have to participate in an auction. The purpose of underwriti…

Why one need underwriter at all? Why certain investors are offered lower unfair price?

> Why one need underwriter at all? Why certain investors are offered lower unfair price?

Those are two completely different things. Underwriters are there to ensure that the company is able to predict the amount of money that an IPO will raise. There are all sorts of legitimate reasons that a company needs to be able to predict the amount of money an IPO will bring in, starting with the fact that it's literally the entire point of an IPO.

Even in the Dutch-auction style that's been proposed in other comments, you don't solve the problem that some investors will be able to invest at the IPO price and others won't. The supply is finite; as long as demand ends up exceeding supply, you're still running the risk of people not being able to purchase shares, except now you've also done away with the invariant that a company can predict the amount of money it's going to raise.

(Note that even Google, which famously used a Dutch auction for its IPO, had an underwriter, and the underwriter had to change the share price at the last-minute because some larger institutional investors indicated that they were going to back out of the IPO and wait to trade later in the day. If that had ended up happening, it would have completely wiped out the money that Google was trying to raise by having the IPO in the first place).

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#196

Post by jiqiren » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:44 AM UTC

jpatokal wrote: post #108

tristanj wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/19/es-took-off-but-the-auction-d...

Sorry, what problems are these? The article mentions that institutional investors were unhappy about not getting their usual 15% guaranteed bounce, but it seems to have worked pretty well for Google and general investors.

I don't think you read closely enough. On the low-end, banks were thinking $108 for the base price per share. As it was, the IPO ended up at $85/share because of it being a dutch-auction where most investors played it safe and did low bids. As soon as the IPO executed (at $85) it popped anyway to $100. So Google potentially lost out on $23/share (minus 7-8% cut from banks).

https://www.quora.com/How-was-Googles-IPO-unique/answer/Yair...

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#197

Post by skinnymuch » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:47 AM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #193

sbov wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Plus was a last ditch effort by a company to get, and keep, any kind of foothold in a market that they continually failed at. It was to my knowledge, at the very least, their fourth attempt (Orkut, open social, Google Buzz, Google Plus... am I missing one?). Calling it a "very real competitor" seems a bit overstated.

Like my comment below states, Google Plus grew to 30M users in their first month and 90M by the end of the year. During this time they were considered a real competitor and many people were predicting that they could dethrone Facebook and that there is nothing that says another competitor won't come along and do to Facebook what they did to Myspace. Sure, looking back now it's easy to say Google Plus was a failure, b…

There were tons of skeptics of Google+ from the get go. Their way of getting users was dubious at best. We don't know how many users were ever true active users vs people who signed up because of having a Google/Gmail account already and checking out Google+ once or twice. Or creating a Google+ account and never coming back or coming back accidentally. Those all still counted as active users. It isn't just hindsight. People including me were calling this from day one.

IG has grown around 45% in the past year. Snapchat has grown half that, close to 23%. IG is the more established social network and growing faster. That's the worry. Sheer numbers make it look so much worse. Snapchat added around 50M new MAUs over the past year. IG did over 4x that at over 200M.

I remember seeing charts similar to the one you posted and dismissing it as BS back then too. As did others. It's a vanity metric. Without knowing the engagement, it is mostly meaningless. And most signs pointed to there being weak actual engagement. Especially if you look past those user's first one or two enhancements of G+. Most prob never engaged again. The same can't be said for the others. FB's first 50M users were by and large engaged. All the others were too, to different degrees. All far above Google+'s.

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#198

Post by neksus » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:57 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #190

gomox wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp, Instagram and FB all have it now. TBH I only see widespread use of it on Instagram, but everyone around me seems to have stopped giving a crap about Snapchat since.

You missed my point. Do WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook Messenger have working ephemeral messages? Or do they have marketing that claims they have ephemeral messages? The feature is fundamentally impossible in exactly the same way as DRM, because it is DRM. You're sending someone a bunch of data and saying "now, you promise not to look at this, right? Except once."

As someone who works on Instagram Direct, I can assure you we have ephemeral messaging.

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#199

Post by skinnymuch » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 3:58 AM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #186

azinman2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IG has a much more active and diverse audience than plus ever did. In fact they are the king within their own world, where as plus was a me too product. I just think they’re different worlds, with diff goals. Snap is more about your honest moment / communication thru pics where as IG is your idealized life.

Yes, IG is king of the general photo sharing social networks, which is different from what IG Stories and Snapchat do. That's why I brought up the comparison to Google Plus, Google did a lot of stuff that Facebook did, and Google Plus was an attempt at bringing a lot of these services together and create a Facebook competitor. Like IG Stories, Google Plus had crazy fast growth at first, they hit almost 30 million use…

That's because many people have been looking for FB's demise for many years now. And generally people are pretty pro-Google. Especially the tech community. Including places like HN. So of course there would be articles and talk of Google+ being a threat. But it was always fluff.

There's articles to this day spelling the doom and gloom of Tesla. Just like there have been many for the past decade. It has always been one of the most shorted stocks. This isn't directly analogous, but just because a large amount of people believe this doesn't mean there aren't also a large amount of people who don't. Aka these people won't have hindsight bias either.

Many people also did not think Google+ was ever a threat, myself included. Google+ was always the butt of jokes with my friends with their inflated user numbers. So there isn't any hindsight bias from me or my friends or many discussions and articles I read during the time that didn't take G+ seriously.

IG stories isn't identical to Snap stories yet. IG is starting to think about allowing you to limit who you post content to. I assume this will be done with nice UX. Then the direct comparison of Snap and IG stories can be made. For now, IG stories main ground it has taken from Snap is unlikely to go back to Snap. People or companies with bigger audiences. IG makes more sense as a place to post your stories for these users.

It's likely that IG stories ratio of users who only consume stories is much greater than Snap. And the avg IG story has many more viewers. But Snapchat likely has many more stories posted.

Re: Snap falls to IPO price

#200

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 4:06 AM UTC

neksus wrote: post #198

thaumasiotes wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed my point. Do WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook Messenger have working ephemeral messages? Or do they have marketing that claims they have ephemeral messages? The feature is fundamentally impossible in exactly the same way as DRM, because it is DRM. You're sending someone a bunch of data and saying "now, you promise not to look at this, right? Except once."

As someone who works on Instagram Direct, I can assure you we have ephemeral messaging.

How do you stop people from recording their messages?

Snapchat takes two approaches (that I know of): First, they don't stop it, but the messager is supposed to be notified when it happens. They know this doesn't work and can't work, though; avoiding screenshot detection isn't even considered a reportable bug. (see https://hackerone.com/snapchat )

Second, they have a legal barrier, in that using a third-party client to communicate over Snapchat violates their terms of service.

Notably, neither of those makes the messages any more ephemeral. This makes sense, because stopping people from recording messages that you send them is not an achievable goal. Barring some sort of supernatural influence, it's no more achievable for Instagram than it is for Snapchat.