Snapchat`s Huge Call

In late 2013 Facebook reportedly offered to buy Snapchat for 3 billion Dollars and Evan Speigal and his company turned it down, the news spread like a virus feeding on curiosity and most would have and did say that the people over at Snapchat are simply crazy!!, "Who on earth would turn down 3 billion?" was the question asked again and again and the simple answer is Snapchat would and did.Looking back at it over a year and a half later Snapchat would say that they made the right choice and that the decision payed off and the people asking the questions do not ask them anymore. Over the recent year Snapchat has made itself very known, it has progressed and developed its social app to great extent by providing features that are both appealing and not plain dumb, the ability to make "photostories" is one of those features and is one which has taken off in the social app`s own atmosphere, the app is simple yet elegant and is quite intuitive, even a person who has never used a smartphone in his entire life would understand it and master it in a day. Snapchat biggest asset is probably the fact that its majority users are teenagers making its community one the most dedicated and active one`s there is, perhaps more active than dedicated but still it is a good target for advertisement agencies which still have not broken into Snapchat ecosystem.Almost 50% of Snapchat users are below the age of 18.

So it is a social environment that is nurturing and still growing, its growth has been phenomenal and recent rounds of funding have valued the company at over 15 billion dollars, yes that is right over 15 billion dollars, looking back the 3 billion they turned down seems to be worth turning down.

Looks like that graph is no mood to come down and it should not at least for some time as their active users have been going up and there seems to be no way down for them. Snapchat`s ability to keep attracting more and more users is largely because it is a photo/video sharing app, it transmits human emotion in its absolute rawness and purity.

 

Snapchat has over a 100 million monthly active users, there are over 700 million photo Snaps per day and 70% users are women. And all this with absolutely no profit and it only started generating revenue in January 2015, seems like that Facebook missed out big time and Snapchat "cashed-out"  big time. And to be fair the people who made the app and are constantly making it better have put a lot into it, they took a neat idea and refined it and worked on it and made it simple and effective and developed it into something very big, so big that its already among the biggest social networks of the world. Snapchat stories covering various cities, events, festivals and religious activities and their popularity among the masses is the solid proof of its existence on a global scale.In the end turning down that whooping 3 billion which looks substantially small for them now was all worth it. As Steve Jobs said, "You can only connect the dots looking backwards".

Saad Bin Zahid

Author & Editor

I am a tech junkie, football is what I love, tech is what I breath. I write about technology, sports and sometimes games.