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Snap Inc. S-1

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Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#41

Post by k-mcgrady »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Interesting DAU-growth plateau around the 150M user mark mid-2016. Maybe there is truth to the theories that Instagram is successfully slowing the drain of users to Snapchat?

Anecdotally I have seen a lot of people AND brands/public figures stop using Snapchat in favour of Instagram stories. Stories on each platform don't cross-post well (Snapchat for example puts a massive white border around posts from the camera roll) so it makes sense to commit to one.

Personally the thing that makes me use Snapchat less is the 'discover' stuff. 9/10 the stuff their promoting to me is top 10 type articles for teenage girls. I enjoy the Economist story but apart from that the rest is garbage. They could have a really nice media consumption platform their but they seem to be wasting it.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#43

Post by [deleted] »

carlisle_ wrote: post #31
leothekim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not possible to build your own "alternative in the market" for $2 billion?

It is absolutely possible to build a stellar internal alternative to Google's offerings in 5 years with 2 billion dollars. edit: I should point out that this doesn't account for ramp-up. It would obviously take awhile before things would be to a point where it would be even comparable.

[deleted]

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#44

Post by whorleater »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #12
stuckagain wrote: post #8

"We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years and have built our software and computer systems to use computing, storage capabilities, bandwidth, and other services provided by Google, some of which do not have an alternative in the market." There's some numbers for you that Google wouldn't have provided (as far as I have seen).

I find the "do not have an alternative in the market" comment interesting - is there really anything which AWS does not have the GCE does?

If you're already tied into GAE, Google's other offerings in cloud become really easy to tie in, from adding buckets in GCS to adding extra stuff in GCE. With the soonish coming of Google Pub/Sub, it takes a lot of effort to switch to AWS.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#45

Post by jonknee »

brandon272 wrote: post #27
chinathrow wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, single cloud lock-in filed with the SEC. Isn't 400m/y a bit steep for storage and compute power?

$400 million annually represents a monthly cost per user of $0.21 at 158 million daily active users. Which seems high at scale when looking at storage + bandwidth alone, I would think, but I'm also not a big Snapchat user so I'm not sure what is going on in terms of long term storage of video on an account level.

I would also assume they have factored in some growth over the next 5 years... If they don't have many multiples of 158M DAU by 2022 they are screwed regardless of their hosting bill.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#46

Post by doubleorseven »

carlisle_ wrote: post #31
leothekim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not possible to build your own "alternative in the market" for $2 billion?

It is absolutely possible to build a stellar internal alternative to Google's offerings in 5 years with 2 billion dollars. edit: I should point out that this doesn't account for ramp-up. It would obviously take awhile before things would be to a point where it would be even comparable.

Just to clarify your answer, here is another thing Google won't tell you: once you build yourself in their cloud you will have to find something else to do with all the time you used to spend on latency.

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#47

Post by bluetwo »

OK, their dirty laundry is about what I would expect it to be. They are required to list these things at this point to avoid being accused of hiding information later.

Given all this, are you buying? If you owned stock day 1 would you sell it?

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#49

Post by whitepoplar »

Serious question: how does Snapchat spend so much money on infrastructure? How could the app run up a $2b Google Cloud tab? Would anyone care to break it down?

Re: Snap Inc. S-1

#50

Post by johansch »

hrrsn wrote: post #30
brandon272 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$400 million annually represents a monthly cost per user of $0.21 at 158 million daily active users. Which seems high at scale when looking at storage + bandwidth alone, I would think, but I'm also not a big Snapchat user so I'm not sure what is going on in terms of long term storage of video on an account level.

I would think their bandwidth costs are astronomical. Since 19/3/16 Snapchat has used 14.8GB of mobile data on my iPhone alone - not including WiFi.

Bandwidth is kinda cheap these days though, if you avoid GC and AWS. Anyone have recent numbers at this scale of commitment?
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