[beat]

Monetizing a social user base is a great strategy for making millions of dollars. But Snapchat is clearly aiming at billions, or they wouldn't have turned down the multi-billion dollar offers they've already received. Facebook has little to fear from social apps with millions in revenue... so why were they willing to pay so much for a zero-revenue company? And why are VCs ponying up tens of millions in funding for a zero-revenue product? The potential revenue from these dinky little solutions suggested here won't even break even for the VC.

No, they have something much bigger and better up their sleeves. Leaving a few million on the table now in the interest of potential billions later is a very good trade.

Personally, I think the world is ready for a footprint-free social app - not just photos, but threaded conversation and what not. Like Facebook, only without anything for employers to troll and exes to stalk. I think they could literally beat Facebook. That's worth a lot of waiting and risk.

[hullo]

Well, they're not talking about leaving a million on the table, they're talking about leaving a million and a half on the table every single day ("if only they'd use our product!"). The figure they come up with is a half a billion dollars, which is a much larger number than you're giving credit to here.

[beat]

That's assuming not-wildly-optimistic assumptions within a self-serving analysis. Dial that back to $100M rather than half a billion, and it's no longer a tremendously appealing option.

Facebook's per-user revenue for US users was $4.19 as of last October (with far smaller amounts for non-US users). And that's with years of experience, rich targeting based on multi-year social data mining, and the ability to embed several ad impressions per pageview. Is Snapchat likely to hit that high mark? Not in the short term, for sure.

[gabemart]

> Facebook's per-user revenue for US users was $4.19 as of last October

Revenue per user over what time period?

[jrpt]

That's over one quarter.

The data is from their 10-Q: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/2956973952...

$832MM revenue from US & Canada, with 199 million users = $4.18

[nostromo]

As a comparison, that's half of Twitter's current annual revenue.

[beat]

And Twitter is unprofitable.

[mcintyre1994]

Apparently Snapchat's costs are incredibly low though. At the very least, their employee count is 2 digits, not 4.

[beat]

That won't last once they're monetizing. They'll have to staff up a great deal.

[bsder]

> Facebook has little to fear from social apps with millions in revenue... so why were they willing to pay so much for a zero-revenue company?

Because Facebook's userbase has saturated and is now leaking off.

To apps like Snapchat.

[colechristensen]

The collective belief that the limited-life feature of snapchat is worth billions of dollars represents what I think is a massive dilution.

Snapchat does nothing email doesn't, and email is free. I don't own and don't want to own any device which can guarantee any message has a limited life, that's all artificial.

[pjc50]

The guarantee isn't crucial, it doesn't have to be watertight; the fact that it sets up an expectation of privacy and non-sharing changes the social context. Enough to become the sexting app of choice. And that's hugely valuable.

[toomuchtodo]

Because when I'm sexting, what I want is to have to endure someone's horrible ad campaign.

[samstave]

Hey... How you doin....

Drink Pepsi.

[rjd]

"Snapchat does nothing email doesn't" is about as useful or poignant as saying "A tractor does nothing a donkey doesn't"

[colechristensen]

Then you clearly don't understand much about donkeys, tractors, or email... or you would rather post flippant remarks than actually add value to the conversation.

[rjd]

I assume you don't use Snapchat then, because it should be fairly self evident.

For one thing, snap chat is audio visual, email is not. The second is snap chat is designed to work in manner to capture the moment without interfering with it, email on the other hand has a very interrupting flow.

So you end up with one product that captures the emotional state of a moment, and the other which doesn't. This weekend for example I received a snap chat taken a friend bombing a motorway exit on roller blades. The fact it self destructs adds to this as well, because its not the content that matters so much as the vibe of the message. When I got that message I was stunned and wanted to see it again, I had the impluse to contact my friend immediately and respond. I would never get that from an email.

I probably get in excess of 100:1 snapchats to emails from friends for those reasons. I also get maybe 20:1 vs Facebook messages now as well now.

[colechristensen]

My mom sends me videos of the cat via email all the time. My level of 'cool' is such that this is the extent to which people send me videos, but a video of a cat watching Netflix on my mother's iPad isn't any different than rollerblading hijinks: email would work great for either and wouldn't involve a third party trying to extract billions of dollars from this simple exchange.

I get it that the emailing a video workflow might not be that great, but all that's missing is a good app for it. You don't need an expensive middleman trying to squeeze profits out of simple communication (Facebook, twitter, snapchat, SMS, etc) when entirely free alternatives exist and have fundamentally better foundations.

E-mail sucks because you _can't_ funnel huge profits out of it, so it hasn't gotten much attention. There is a real and huge opportunity for making communication better without trying to vendor-lock your users into ad-laden privacy hell, but it hasn't quite been done yet.

I have ideas, but I don't yet have the resources or motivation to move on it and might never. I hope somebody does though, because I'm tired of dealing with the middle-men in personal communication and afraid of the potential for abuse of power many of them have.

[higherpurpose]

> No, they have something much bigger and better up their sleeves.

Better security and real privacy (messages that are private from the company itself) would be nice.