[hahahsnap]

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.

[askafriend]

> 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.

If autoplay means people watch more stories, then so be it. I don't understand what you're trying to say or suggest here.

Also fun fact: Snapchat used to have auto-play before they redesigned their app.

> 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).

Classic example of HN hubris. You have no numbers but yet are so quick to make such a bold claim. Do you really think Instagram doesn't know what the feed engagement numbers are before and after adding stories at the top? Do you honestly in your heart believe that this number wasn't very closely tracked and tested over and over again with different designs, prototypes, and user research?

If so, I think that's an incredibly naive notion and anyone who's worked at one of these high growth consumer internet companies can attest to that.

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

This isn't remotely true even from a pure eye-test perspective. Instagram's stories cover Snapchat's usecase pretty well.

I've been a user of both products and many of my friend groups use one of these products at least. I have a lot of personal experiences and industry knowledge to draw from but I prefer to talk numbers (which speak for themselves quite honestly).

> 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.

This is just silly. Of course Snap wants to grow its userbase. Perhaps they're not concerned with growth rate in the near future but you can sure as hell bet that the market is closely watching. To believe otherwise is naive.

I mean just look at analyst expectation quarter over quarter for companies in a similar category (see: Twitter). The market wants to see consistent growth. Their whole value is predicated on growth and engagement. There are pretty simple levers that Snapchat can pull to grow its business and all of those levers fall under two categories: Growth and Engagement.

Just look at their massive Google Cloud deal to see if they care about growth or not. They pre-committed billions over the course of a couple of years for cloud services alone.

[adjkant]

> If autoplay means people watch more stories, then so be it. I don't understand what you're trying to say or suggest here. If anything, Snapchat should implement autoplay for themselves and see what happens. It's at least worth a test.

They did implement it and rolled it back. I think it has to do with use case. Instagram is very much like Facebook in that it is an addictive feed style. Snapchat is more selection.

> Re: Growth, The Market, Engagement

Last I checked, the biggest lever they have is ad revenue, and how quickly that grows. That is the road to profitability if there is one, isn't it? Their engagement is plenty for advertisers - I don't see a 3 min boost in engagement being reflecting in hoards of advertisers. That could even be reflective of a user experience that scares away more users and ends up being a net ad negative. Growth helps, but they have valuable users already. See below for more. As far as the market, with their IPO and stock terms, I'm not so sure they care much there. The founders and employees got their short term money, as did the company in general.

> Instagram's stories cover Snapchat's use case pretty well.

In my experience, they are completely different. It could be age related perhaps?

Instagram is a profile you curate of moments for you and others to look back on, a feed to follow people and fun accounts, and stories are mostly celebrities.

Snapchat is for a night out or other fun activities, messaging your close friends, and an app to pull out for fun when bored. At least yet, I don't know of any of my friends using Instagram in those ways, though as we know, Facebook has been trying nonstop to get into those with things like Facebook Direct, the Snapchat full clone in Messenger, etc. So far, the only thing that has stuck is stories, and it worked because it was much better for following celebrities and the like, not at the close personal level. The viewers and network effect is what gives IG stories such high user numbers. I doubt the creation rate is there from what I know of my friends. Again, maybe it's different for older demo's.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

As far as numbers go, there are two things keeping Snapchat afloat as a company (forget the speculative stock price here):

1. They have a lot of users that Instagram doesn't. Advertisers love young people, and that's where they are.

2. Instagram/Facebook have yet to crack into the personal messaging aspect like Snapchat has.

I actually hate feed apps and don't use that part of Snapchat at all usually, and if I do, it's in the same way as trending news on Facebook (hey what's going on in the world real quick). I deleted my Instagram pretty quickly and opted for my own personal photo collection. Snapchat is something I use for my close friends - I mainly message about 10 people or less, and view stories of maybe 20. But I use it way more than Messenger, which is used for group chats and acquaintances who don't have my iMessage.

Even with the slow user growth rate, those users aren't going away (yet). Time will tell how that plays out in the future. But the moat that's keeping Snapchat alive right now is young users and close personal communication. If those two pieces go elsewhere, I don't see them surviving. I also don't see those going to anything IG/Facebook/Messenger has put out yet.

[dx034]

> Advertisers love young people, and that's where they are.

Not necessarily. Advertisers love people who are young and have money. So 20-35 is much more valuable than 12-16. Not sure where the average age for Snapchat users is, but I can imagine that they have a higher share of users who are too young to generate revenue for advertisers.

Unrelated to that it's just because advertisers are slow to catch up. Generally, advertising is most profitable where the most money is. And that is with older people. Successful online marketing to 60+yrs is much more profitable than to 20-25yr olds.

[adjkant]

Their S1 says their largest age group is users aged 18-24, beating out what I would assume is 13-18.

https://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2017/04/03/snapc...

The above shows the split of users over 18, but isn't helpful is showing how many are age 13-17 and the proportions.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/326452/snapchat-age-grou...

According to this, 80% of users are over 18, with over 50% falling into that 18-34 block.

[yellow_postit]

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

[hahahsnap]

Do you think running a social media app which is multimedia heavy for developing countries give you profit?

Sorry that's not true. Facebook generated revenue of ~25 million for 2016 in India. Supporting 100s of millions of users content for 25M dollars. I'm sorry this is a lossy business but good thing to keep increasing number of users to pump up the stock price and keep engineers motivated.

Snapchat won't go to countries like India, SE asia which are densely populated as it doesn't really make sense to them. 1. Poor app experience as users have cheap android phones in which fb app won't even work properly. 2. Hosting cost/Advertiser cost might not be great.

These two points make sure, investing in developing countries to get more users is nothing more of a Stock Play and a joke.

[what_ever]

If you see this thread, you are the only one defending Snap and you yourself have uninstalled Instagram. I personally used both for a while and now I have pretty much stopped using Snapchat in favor of Instagram.

Sure Snapchat is still the more known of the two when it comes to sending photos directly but that's not where money is made. Money is made in stories by having sponsored stories and ads inserted between the stories of the people you follow. Instagram is getting more of this so they can show more ads and make more money. Also, the advertisers you seem to be so sure of being on Snapchat will move their money to Instagram once they know that Instagram has more users and more eyes. Also teenagers don't make any money to spend on things after watching the ads. So I am not sure if that's a positive in favor of Snapchat.

If five people are telling they think this is looking good for Instagram which you have already uninstalled, may be its time to look back at your opinions. But who am I to tell, I don't have any horse in this race. I do own some $FB but not enough to think about this one way or the other.

[hahahsnap]

Please post your demography, age, what your social network looks like. We can discuss from there why you're using instagram instead of snapchat :)

Teenagers don't have money but they have drive purchasing decisions within a family.

"once they know that Instagram has more users and more eyes" >> Advertisers just don't look at raw numbers. They advertise over a target audience. US, age, gender, mobile phone users: 18-24. Snapchat got a generation of users which facebook/instagram is not able to get. FB and instagram is using their demographics which is not at all important to manipulate snapchat stock price.

If advertisers are paying more money just for some random views, then ad industry has some serious issues and it's not called effective advertising.

[vit05]

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-...

[malloryerik]

Spain qualifies as a poor country? Damn...

[godzillabrennus]

The amazing part of Spain being a poor country is that all Arab countries combined have a lower GDP than Spain.

The Bay Area has a larger GDP than the country of Mexico.

[adventured]

> The amazing part of Spain being a poor country is that all Arab countries combined have a lower GDP than Spain.

That's not true.

Spain: $1.23 trillion

Saudi Arabia: $639b, UAE: $371b, Egypt: $332b

Those three combined are larger than Spain's economy.

Then you also have Iraq: $167b, Algeria: $160b Qatar: $156b, Morocco: $103b, Sudan $94b, etc.

[eipipuz]

Where are you getting those numbers? Bay Area: $758.5B, Mexico $1,046B

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Economy https://tradingeconomics.com/mexico/gdp

[bduerst]

Snap's target market's unemployment rate is somewhere around 40% in Spain.

[aphexbr]

I'm in Spain, and I know a lot of local Snapchat users. Not sure what he's on about.

[mandeepj]

He has denied that allegation.

http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/app-for-all-says-snapchat-aft...

[electic]

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.

[ridruejo]

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

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

[cvsh]

>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.

Not sure when the last time you used Snapchat was, but this is definitely not true anymore. Stories do autoplay and will continue on to the next person on your friends list.

[temporary_art]

Fun fact: this is one of the common Snapchat "hidden features", you can select all and auto play by tapping the "circle of triangles" stories icon in the stories screen. If you check stories fairly often it's a great feature.