No, in 1999 most public tech companies didn't account for stock options in that way. They pretended they weren't an expense, boosting their profitability figures. Although the dotcom bubble arguably played a big role in finally causing a shift in that accounting practice.
Like other people have mentioned, this is mainly stock compensation related, but the funniest part is that they tag this loss % as "Not meaningful" in their financial statements. Just a not meaningful $2B loss :)
To be fair, it's a pure accounting loss, not an actual loss (of money in the bank) for the business. So in that respect it doesn't seem unreasonable to do.
Companies don't die when they lose money. They cut expenses or they get acquired. Companies die when they have no revenue. If I were an investor in Snap I would much rather see them raise revenue then cut expenses or decrease loses. Their loses are considered in the stock price.
I'm not suggesting the wealth actually is being destroyed in this case. It's a mental heuristic for comprehending large amounts.
A billion dollars isn't an amount of wealth that has any real meaning to my brain compared to things that happen in my life. On the other hand, I have a very real and personal understanding of about how much a house is worth. From that, it's reasonable to get a gut understanding of an amount of cost by imagining houses being destroyed at a certain pace.
I honestly expect them to roll it back. I've used it for a few weeks on the beta, and it's turned me away from certain features because they're so separated and disjoint.
Snap users and advertisers have responded very positively to the clear division between user generated content and advertising. If you are not a Snap user, or if you haven't used it in awhile, I encourage you to check it out.
Snap advertisers are mostly lifestyle brands that want to engage with their users in a new way. Tacobell isn't advertising on Snap, but Popular Mechanics is. When a user clicks on Popular Mechanics they have confidence it's because a user wants to engage with them, and Popular Mechanics hopes this closer relationship has benefits outside of the Snapchat app. A user choosing to give you their attention is a _very_ valuable thing. Most other social media advertisements are missing this part.
Just wondering why you say Tacobell isnt advertising on Snap? They were part of a very publicized campaign a couple years ago [1], are you saying they've stopped?
My guess is it's just another way of saying people like consuming media from companies that are relevant to their interests.
I personally find Snap's advertising to be nice. It's nice to have it separate from what my friends upload like what others have said. I've also found that what Snap puts out is way more enjoyable to look at than Facebook's advertisements.
Take sports for example. I'm a huge NFL, NBA, and MLB fan. Facebook's sports-oriented ads are usually limited to the game score which I don't need to look at because the game is already on my TV. Snap, on the other hand, puts up a nice collection of Snapchat videos from other people. I can get a pre-game locker room video from the players and I can get a fan's view of the game-winning touchdown in the same collection. Both are things you wouldn't see on a typical game broadcast. I'm fully aware that both are advertisements, but one is significantly more relevant and more enjoyable for me to consume than the other.
Engaging means to give them attention, and assumes a level of active participation. In this case engaging means clicking, watching, swiping, and sharing.
Lifestyle brands are a type of business as varied as Wired Magazine to Rayban Sunglasses. They aren't selling a product, but a "lifestyle" or a feeling. Some people legitimately feel differently when drinking Pepsi verses Coca-Cola.
If you see a popular guy wearing Gucci it can increase the value you give that brand. Gucci has a markup because of this "lifestyle" effect.
Edit: Lifestyle brand literally has a Wikipedia article on it, if you want to know more.
> Why would I want to "engage" with "lifestyle brands"? What does that even mean?
Telling "Apple" that you despise them for batterygate. Or tell them how much you really like the new touchbar. Stuff like that is "engage" with "brands."
I'm not a Snap user, so I'm not really sure what I would do. Send them a snap of my middle finger?
I'm definitely not anyones target demographic, but I do find some satisfaction engaging with Totino's Pizza Rolls.
Depends on what kind of content the lifestyle brand wants to pitch me.
I like weight lifting as a sport. I once saw a video from a popular fitness band that had a ton of advice on proper form and approach before a competition.
I got a lot of value from that and would happily give my time and money to a brand that does the same for other things I enjoy
Search for it? Also you can "tell the algorithm" that you want to see less Kylie Jenner (I did that, and I've started to enjoy the kind of content that's been popping up).
This is what makes me lose hope for the web. I see the same celebrity tripe and clickbait on Snapchat, and while annoying, I'm not going to spend my limited time on earth teaching an app my preferences so it can suck up more of my time with brands that want to "engage" with me in new ways. I go there to engage with my human friends, and honestly I'd pay a couple bucks a month to get Snapchat without the brands taking up my screen.
I don't really feel the same way, one of the primary things I use social media for is for the sake of news aggregation, things like NYTimes, WaPo, ect.
Can you tell me how you get to see stuff from Popular Mechanics there? Whenever I inadvertently swipe over to the commercial section, it just shows me a bunch of useless plastic celebrities, often in little clothing.
I absolutely hate Facebook, but I think Snap is really getting 'social media' right. There's no political nonsense or advertising being shoved down my throat, just endless cat videos and memes from my friends the way it should be. When my friends post something, it's guaranteed I will see it. There are options for group chat and 'forum' style communication, but the core experience is intimate and private. They're doing all the right things IMO (for now).
Snap separated out the sponsored stuff into a different section from your friends and gives you full control of the communication area, which IMO is much better than what Facebook is doing with "recommended for you" nonsense popping into my Instagram feed.
There's probably a lot of interesting sponsored content, but if I want to just use it as a chat app it doesn't get in the way. That's the big advantage that Apple has with iMessages, no pressure to make a worse service for users in order to turn a profit. We'll see if Snap can manage to do it without driving their users off to the next one.
This fundamental property of "show me only things from people I explicitly added, and show me everything they post (ideally in reverse chronological order)" is what many (myself included) seem to want from social media.
Sadly, it seems to be directly at odds with what companies want, because social networks often start off with having that property and lose it as they need to make the investors happy.
- Facebook -> hasn't been true in a looooong time
- Instagram -> hasn't been true in a few years
- Twitter -> I think it's not true anymore? Might be if you click the right options in your settings, but who knows for how long
Yeah, Twitter switched to an algorithmic feed in 2016 [1]. There is an option to turn off "Show the best Tweets first," but I don't know if that will actually cause the entire feed to be chronological.
An annoying thing about Twitter that I experienced recently is I started getting notifications for "top Tweets." I had to tell Twitter multiple times that I didn't want them before they stopped (there was no option to put an immediate stop to them).
There is no way that I've found to turn off Twitter things like trying to recommend people to follow, or things I might've missed. I cancel them every time and get the "We'll show this less often" response, but cannot get them to just never show again. It's baffling that they go out of their way to frustrate long term users.
The other annoying new feature in Twitter is the notifications for missed tweets or summaries. I mean, there is a reason I've missed those tweets. I don't want to be taken into the past. If I need to, I'll scroll a hundred times and visit the past. Please show me the latest tweets on my page without any notifications or other distractions, preferably sorted by the importance of people I follow.
Importance = function (frequency of me retweeting or liking this person's tweets, duration of follow)
To add a voice for the other side of it - I've found those quite useful. I follow people all over the world and live in London. When I have a look at twitter in the morning I actually like that it'll show me (some) tweets from people I follow in the US or Asia that I would've easily missed. I can't say for sure but it seems to prioritise them in some way based on my previous interactions or how many times the tweet in question was interacted with overnight.
Perspectives :). I don't like this feature for exactly the same reason. I wake up in the morning and there is a deluge of notifications since most of the people I follow are in the opposite timezone.
Instagram still only shows me posts from users I've followed. It's no longer in reverse chronological order as of about 18 months ago, which is unfortunate.
What I would really want for Instagram to allow me to select certain users to show their posts first. Facebook lets me do this.
> This fundamental property of "show me only things from people I explicitly added, and show me everything they post (ideally in reverse chronological order)" is what many (myself included) seem to want from social media.
> Sadly, it seems to be directly at odds with what companies want
There is a companyless protocol for this exact functionality, RSS.
algorithmic sorting increases monetization opportunities by several orders of magnitude, that's why they do it. Just fiddle with the algorithm to decrease reach of a certain group of users, then make those users pay for extra reach. Voila! You have a new revenue stream now. Facebook has showed that that's the winning monetization formula for social media.
I have never used facebook or snapchat but this is what drove me off of linkedin too, it used to be 100% updates from people I knew, and somehow morphed into 99% "news feed" crap that I never want to see, ever.
I don't care what your analytics say about user engagement, they are wrong. Just stop the "relevancy game" and the stupid news feeds everywhere.
I think we need an add-on to Zawinski's law, "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail." These days, every program seems to expand until it includes an unwanted news feed.
I do think compared to Facebook, Snapchat has been slow to open up their platform. I think that has actually helped Snap as I don’t know that the ways in which Facebook has opened up it’s platform has contributed much in terms of value to the share price.
I thought Snap was not doing so well. I watch Gary Vaynerchuck and it seems like every guest he has all say the same thing, "Snap used to be great for me, now no1 is there".
It works well for medium-scale “personalities”. A lot of content creators (streamers / IG model / porn star / etc) offer snapchat access in exchange for a certain tier of patronage
The cynic in me feels this has more to do with the quarterly imperative to improve numbers showing that they've figured out how to start monetizing rather than an indication of the health of the company. The number of friends I see using Snapchat have dwindled mightily, although I admit I'm not quite the target audience (being a 29 year old male.
Alternative headline: SNAP somehow surges 22% in after-hours trading despite reporting a $3.5BN loss and burning $819MM in cash.
While revenue and user growth are both positive signs, there are still plenty of red flags. SNAP's hefty valuation is based on much higher growth rates and a faster route to profitability that still has yet to be seen.
The "Publisher" stories I see on Snapchat are invariably stories about various Kardashian/Jenner family members or generic buzzfeed-esque millennial-targeted clickbait.
These seem very poorly targeted towards me. Does everyone see only this? Are there ways to get into different/better advertising buckets? Even something like "GQ" would be far better than the "People" content I'm currently seeing.
On Instagram the ads are targeted at things I would actually click through and buy -- lots of ads for shoes, bags, clothing, kickstarter-like items, etc.
I assume that's via the hashtags and people I follow on Instagram: cars, travel, architecture, etc. + perhaps via some creepy FaceBook magic.
Without hashtags, how does Snapchat figure out what "Publishers" I'd want to see?
That's mostly what I see in the publisher section too. I wasn't under the impression that it was curated per user but I could be wrong. I don't interact with the publisher stuff a ton.
Yes (at least with the new version), you should be able to long click on the story and say show less of this. (Source, I've done this and it's worked pretty well).
Snapchat has object recognition. With a ton of photos/videos stored in memories, they could get a decent idea of one's interests based on object recognition and text used in Snaps.
You can tell them to ignore some publishers and subscribe to others. My Snapchat subscriptions are NYT, Wired, WaPo, and a few others. I have blocked People and Daily Mail.
In the last 24 hours I've gotten the newly designed app, and it is much more prominent now on how to subscribe/block publishers. Did subscriptions even exist in the previous app?
Yeah they did - I still don't have the new update and have that model. Like most of Snapchat of old, it's all hidden features. While I'm worried about the new update, there are definitely some advantages. I love the separation concept but just hope they roll back to the non-chronological and maybe the story/message mix.
I find this an interesting and refreshing part of snapchats’ advertising platform (to be clear I do not care about what the kardashians ate for breakfast). Spiegel has said in the past that they would strive to not target individual users based on browsing history, etc. as Facebook and Twitter do. https://venturebeat.com/2015/06/22/ceo-evan-spiegel-in-canne.... This was before the app went public and I’m sure there has been significant pressure from shareholders to produce a better product for advertisers that makes even more money. However, it seems at some point these “untargeted ads” were/are intentional
With Instagram you either get Facebook's hyper-niche targeting parameters, or ads based on previous engagement as well.
Snapchat's targeting is deliberately vague (based on the presumed anonymity of the service) - which can be ok for brand-awareness campaigns, but bad for conversion campaigns, hence why you see it more tailored to puff-piece content over and above specific ecommerce.
Seemed like an interesting tool, but a harder one for SMEs to sign off on compared to IG/FB/Google.
Why would you want their ads targeted towards you?
That means Snapchat would need to capture and analyze your information at the risk of your privacy. I'm totally fine with Kylie Jenner ads as long if it means my privacy is respected.
Half the reason I like Instagram is that I'm able to follow people I don't know who post interesting things. Photographers, makers, artists, etc. Some of these follows are "brands", I suppose. This is all independent of the actual in-feed advertising product.
I'm not looking for targeted ads on Snapchat, but am looking to replicate that Instagram model of following non-IRL people/things that I like. I thought that's what the entire right Publishers tab was for, but (until today's update) I was only getting Kardashians there and had seemingly no way to promote anything else.
why does every post about Snap seem to fill up with (what sounds like) astroturf? This comment section has at least five undisclosed Snap marketers posting and and voting in it or I'm a llama. Multiple comments in the top comment chain sound like a PM's cocktail party talking points.
I’ll be honest - I’m rooting for SNAP and I want to see them succeed. Anything to challenge the Facebook social monopoly and at least pretends to put on a facade of privacy.
lol, i don't know why you think snap will be any better or any better currently. They are all just advertising companies. Lets not be naive and really pretend one is really better than the other.
There's a huge gap between a company like Turner Broadcasting and Facebook, despite the fact that on paper, they are both advertising companies. The one that isn't sucking in huge amounts of data is a clearly better to me.
> There's a huge gap between a company like Turner Broadcasting and Facebook, despite the fact that on paper, they are both advertising companies.
On paper, neither Facebook nor TBS is an advertising company.
Advertising companies create and manage advertising campaigns; TBS and Facebook are media companies in different segments of the media whose primary income stream is through selling advertising space.
>>You're example is a strawman. Turner Broadcasting and Facebook is like comparing apples and oranges.
How is it a strawman? They both make revenue from selling attention.
>But Snap is sucking in huge amounts of data
Snap's ad-manager is no where near as sophisticated as FBs. Either we disagree on the definition of huge, or you have no idea what kind of targeting FB is capable of. When Snap has a js tag on almost every site then I'd might agree.
As a member of 18~23yo age group ("young person"), I would say snaps the only social media I enjoy using besides HN/reddit.
Most young people I know use Facebook for groups (local like a school or city), events , and chat. IMO Facebook is shooting all of these feet off with the algorithmic newsfeed and spinning off messenger.
Snap however is used constantly to keep up with peers. Haven't met a single person that uses instagram's stories, even though its usage numbers tell another story.
It really might just be my age/location/privlege bubble, but it consistently baffles me that Facebook keeps growing at such a faster speed than snap.
I asked my younger siblings and none of them nor their friends have facebooks, besides the one in college. They all have snap and insta, and spend ~2X time on snap than insta. Most text communication is snap or SMS.
How do they communicate when placed Infront of a computer? I see the appeal of snap with the younger crowd but the fact that it lives in a phone seems like a major con, sure it's easily fixed by allowing browser access. As someone who grew up on MSN & ICQ I couldn't imagine having to stop what I'm doing to pick up my phone every time I want to message someone.
Pretty interface, easy to use, voice is pretty low latency (although I miss my mumble server), and it uses ~80mb of ram to sit in like 5 groups, which while not fantastic blows "rather open it in chrome" slack out of the water.
New signal desktop instantly uses 200mb and has to "loading messages" for 3s every single startup :(
It's not buggy for you? The tab on the left is always glitching out on me, and things just simply don't work like they should, whether I'm using Firefox or Chrome. It incorrectly says "<so and so> is typing..." when the person is typing in a different subchat.
On the whole, for a product proudly marketing itself as a Slack replacement, it does a terrible job actually providing the same functionality.
I would say "computer people" ie spend a significant portion of their time on a computer with a physical qwerty keyboard tend to use FB messenger to chat or discord if they play games.
My preference is probably steam chat. The new signal desktop is a dumpster fire.
Most people in my age group simply don't spend very much time in front of a computer. Their phone is their portal to the internet and has generally everything they're looking for.
One of the items frequently mentioned themes around this quarters results is that Snap is finally making some progress overseas (emerging and everywhere else).
Tencent bought 12% of Snap in Nov of 2017. Likely that has, and will continue to push emerging market efforts by Snap.
That's very interesting, because in my age/location bubble (21/Denmark) it's the exact opposite. For every 30 Instagram stories, people post about 1 Snapchat story.
Talked to a friend yesterday who said that he forgot Snapchat even existed, and was installed on his phone, because he hadn't received a snap in a year.
Also, my younger siblings both use Snapchat and Messenger consistently, and are avid users of Facebook (because of meme tagging primarily).
Snap seems to be pretty usa centered, which explains a lot.
On memes, I think for me and most of my friends something like 90% of facebook use is meme pages.
I think people that use facebook as a meme platform will move to different platforms when something offers pseudonymity with consistent user blocking (ie pseudonym that must be linked to a phone#) and solid group/forum posting + chat features. I think people are vaguely uncomfortable with putting their real name into "Red Commie Memes For Anti-State Teens" type groups and will want to move to pseudonymous or temporal (snap) platforms when they reach feature parity.
Right now facebook memes are growing fast because it is easy for "normie" facebook users to click a couple memes and get sucked into the vortex.
I don't know a single person in Vietnam who uses Snapchat. Every person I've ever met uses Instagram. Everyone uses Facebook. Facebook Messenger is the most popular chat tool by a fair margin. No one ever sends a message by Snap or SMS.
We have a population of 100 million.
The world is bigger than just the US.
Indonesia, with a population of 260 million, also overwhelmingly prefers Facebook over Snapchat.
My response was: who gives a shit when people in Cambodia don't use your app ? Meaning they're less valuable.
But now that I think a little more, maybe we're starting to see a shift of say, tobacco + fast-food etc moving into poorer countries to extract $$ from them. So this mobile-game-social-addiction is the next/current step.
As with iMessage vs WhatsApp, I think this is more of a divide based on location rather than age. In the US Snapchat might be prevalent because iOS is prevalent. My guess is in the rest of the world Instagram dominates and is gaining further ground.
Isn’t Whatsapp huge everywhere except for primarily the US and obviously China? Also Japan and South Korea as they have Line and Kakao. But the US is mostly an anomaly with not using Whatsapp.
Instagram is also a behemoth compared to Snapchat. Same with Whatsapp and FBM.
Snapchat is the only social media that actually celebrates the impermanence and general boringness of everyday life.
Instagram and Facebook may have stories but the site is heavily predicated on pride/narcissism arms race with your "friends".
Even your biggest narcissist can only "win" for 24 hours on Snapchat and from what I can see they'll generally tap out of keeping up any facades to try and make others jealous about how (seemingly) great their life is within 4-5 weeks of using it and then join others in appreciating the little things that make life worth living.
Your own personal values and mileage may vary, but they've hit a niche with me.
I think that "niche" is what you share with most people under 19 or so as of today.
People are quick to write off Snapchat's popularity with young users as it being the hot new toy they will tire with, but I think it's a lot deeper than that. They see the mistakes of millennials and older with social media and want nothing to do with it (and are thus nowhere to be found on Facebook, yet still on Instagram because it hasn't suffered the same problems yet). Snapchat avoids a lot of those pitfalls, though of course not without other problems. I think so long as that impermanence is the focus, and they allow for easy/simple communication between close friends (I'm worried about the non-chronological part for this exact reason), they will be a big part of the future of social media.
Facebook and the apps it owns have all tried towards that, but if the core is permanence (the classic profile, posts, walls, likes, comments), they will always be fighting a rising tide. Adding stories on top of that doesn't change the core use of the app.
>> They see the mistakes of millennials and older with social media and want nothing to do with it (and are thus nowhere to be found on Facebook, yet still on Instagram because it hasn't suffered the same problems yet)
I’d be interested to see data to support this assertion.
It's hard data to get because people still have Facebook accounts, they just don't post on them. In order to get that data, Facebook would have to release it by choice, and good luck with that one.
Do an experiment though. Look at all your friends around 17-18 (hard if you're older to get a good sample size, but find someone who has friends that age if possible). Now scroll through their walls and see when you hit 2016. I bet it's pretty quick in 75%+ cases.
I just did it on the few I have (siblings of college friends). One took 4 posts to get to 2015. Two of those were blocks of happy birthday posts grouped together. I know all of those people are very active on Instagram though.
Now if you can, look at people ages 23-25 or so. See how much more they post.
This is of course only data you can essentially get from being young and having access to friends in both ranges. But I see it time and time again.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply the age group is the niche, nor actually did I mean to imply the value was niche either, hence the quotes. I typed the comment that way though because I think a large proportion of people over about 24 don't understand the value of Snapchat for various reasons, often beleiving the value is "niche".
I also put that cutoff at 19 for a reason based on my experience with others. I'm right on the border of millennial and whatever they decide comes after it. Most people my age used Facebook originally and evacuated gradually over the past 3-5 years. If you look at people 19 and under, they are barely to be found at all on Facebook since they would be aged 16-14 at the time of that evacuation, and thus have no need to evacuate if they never had an account they used in a significant manner.
> They see the mistakes of millennials and older with social media and want nothing to do with it (and are thus nowhere to be found on Facebook, yet still on Instagram because it hasn't suffered the same problems yet).
I have a hard time believing that people under 18 are making a conscious decision on this, especially the 'see the mistakes of milennials' part. They're only concerned with themselves an their status in their group, just like millenials were, but on a different platform.
My early teen sister, for example, uses Instagram and Snapchat for two reasons: all het friends use it, my mom doesn't want her to use Facebook because it has a bad rep. The fact that Instagram is owned by Facebook is something that most people, outside of the well informed, are unaware of.
Their moms (say 26-36yo range here) are on facebook, post pictures of them, and like their posts. It's never going to be the youth platform as long as everything said is said in front of your mom, dad, grandma, and racist uncle.
Young people -desperately- want to take selfies that won't get dredged up 3 years later, and have been hearing about horror stories about people posting pictures of illicit or just immature activities since myspace. A kid who has been aware of their whole life is about <20yo.
Great to see the conversation going on here.
I work at Snap on our revenue and product features and am hiring for my team. If you are passionate about being a part of building the future of Augmented Reality, Creative Tools or in general building systems at scale, drop me a message.
I'm looking for engineers with strong backgrounds in building scalable distributed systems, our apis and services receive billions of requests per day. In addition, if you are an IOS or Android (especially) goes without saying, send me a message too!
My two complaints with Snapchat are that the app itself is somewhat bloated. In addition, I've turned off personalized ads and as far as I can tell, they're respecting it since all the ads are just lowest-common-denominator drivel
I wish any of my friends would use snapchat, I would be so happy! Instead they use instagram stories, but I can't open instagram without being bombarded by tons of spam and irrelevant ads anymore, I just can't use it.
Snapchat has advertising? I'll admit, I'm a neophyte and basically just use it for texting a handful of people that for whatever reason appear to be allergic to good old SMS, but I've never seen any of it. I'm not sure where I'd go in the app to see it.
I suppose it's a good thing; they're not wasting any of those views on people like me...
I called this when Snap introduced self serve ads. Since then I've been seeing a bunch of insurance/debt ads that are obviously affiliate campaigns.
Like it or not, this is how FB bootstrapped their ads business (acai berry anyone?), and Snap is smart to capture the long tail of self-serve advertisers.
i think people who argue "Snapchat will never be as big as Facebook" are just wasting their time. Who cares? Social experience feels more engaging. FB is better for "acquaintanceships", but Snapchat is better for friendships.
I've been trying to get into snapchat for the past 2 months and I still just don't see the appeal. Every interaction I've had with someone on the platform could have just as easily happened in any other messenger platform (pick one of the 1000s out there). I'm only 29, but I feel way too old to be using snapchat. Maybe I'm missing something, but I see myself deleting the app this year.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadhttps://hbr.org/2003/03/for-the-last-time-stock-options-are-...
reason is, the "loss" isn't cash outflow, it's from compensation by creating stock, which investors pay for via dilution.
A billion dollars isn't an amount of wealth that has any real meaning to my brain compared to things that happen in my life. On the other hand, I have a very real and personal understanding of about how much a house is worth. From that, it's reasonable to get a gut understanding of an amount of cost by imagining houses being destroyed at a certain pace.
I like these comparisons because I can see them, and marvel at the sheer bigness of them.
Snap is the only innovative social media website right now. Let's see how they do in future
Snap advertisers are mostly lifestyle brands that want to engage with their users in a new way. Tacobell isn't advertising on Snap, but Popular Mechanics is. When a user clicks on Popular Mechanics they have confidence it's because a user wants to engage with them, and Popular Mechanics hopes this closer relationship has benefits outside of the Snapchat app. A user choosing to give you their attention is a _very_ valuable thing. Most other social media advertisements are missing this part.
[1] https://www.marketingdive.com/news/taco-bells-cinco-de-mayo-...
I should not have used that example.
Think outside the bun for a change.
My guess is it's just another way of saying people like consuming media from companies that are relevant to their interests.
I personally find Snap's advertising to be nice. It's nice to have it separate from what my friends upload like what others have said. I've also found that what Snap puts out is way more enjoyable to look at than Facebook's advertisements.
Take sports for example. I'm a huge NFL, NBA, and MLB fan. Facebook's sports-oriented ads are usually limited to the game score which I don't need to look at because the game is already on my TV. Snap, on the other hand, puts up a nice collection of Snapchat videos from other people. I can get a pre-game locker room video from the players and I can get a fan's view of the game-winning touchdown in the same collection. Both are things you wouldn't see on a typical game broadcast. I'm fully aware that both are advertisements, but one is significantly more relevant and more enjoyable for me to consume than the other.
Lifestyle brands are a type of business as varied as Wired Magazine to Rayban Sunglasses. They aren't selling a product, but a "lifestyle" or a feeling. Some people legitimately feel differently when drinking Pepsi verses Coca-Cola.
If you see a popular guy wearing Gucci it can increase the value you give that brand. Gucci has a markup because of this "lifestyle" effect.
Edit: Lifestyle brand literally has a Wikipedia article on it, if you want to know more.
Telling "Apple" that you despise them for batterygate. Or tell them how much you really like the new touchbar. Stuff like that is "engage" with "brands."
I'm not a Snap user, so I'm not really sure what I would do. Send them a snap of my middle finger?
I'm definitely not anyones target demographic, but I do find some satisfaction engaging with Totino's Pizza Rolls.
I like weight lifting as a sport. I once saw a video from a popular fitness band that had a ton of advice on proper form and approach before a competition.
I got a lot of value from that and would happily give my time and money to a brand that does the same for other things I enjoy
Do you have any sources to back up this claim?
There's probably a lot of interesting sponsored content, but if I want to just use it as a chat app it doesn't get in the way. That's the big advantage that Apple has with iMessages, no pressure to make a worse service for users in order to turn a profit. We'll see if Snap can manage to do it without driving their users off to the next one.
What a novel approach to online socializing, said IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ...
I forget though, that SV and places like Ycom can't resell old tech to investors.
Pets.com taught us you have to just keep cranking out the hits, or they'll get wise to the hollow value really being proposed.
Sadly, it seems to be directly at odds with what companies want, because social networks often start off with having that property and lose it as they need to make the investors happy.
- Facebook -> hasn't been true in a looooong time
- Instagram -> hasn't been true in a few years
- Twitter -> I think it's not true anymore? Might be if you click the right options in your settings, but who knows for how long
An annoying thing about Twitter that I experienced recently is I started getting notifications for "top Tweets." I had to tell Twitter multiple times that I didn't want them before they stopped (there was no option to put an immediate stop to them).
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/technology/personaltech/p...
Importance = function (frequency of me retweeting or liking this person's tweets, duration of follow)
What I would really want for Instagram to allow me to select certain users to show their posts first. Facebook lets me do this.
> Sadly, it seems to be directly at odds with what companies want
There is a companyless protocol for this exact functionality, RSS.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1367/
https://diasporafoundation.org/
I don't care what your analytics say about user engagement, they are wrong. Just stop the "relevancy game" and the stupid news feeds everywhere.
But that's exactly why it works so well for small groups and close friends.
While revenue and user growth are both positive signs, there are still plenty of red flags. SNAP's hefty valuation is based on much higher growth rates and a faster route to profitability that still has yet to be seen.
[1] https://investor.snap.com/~/media/Files/S/Snap-IR/reports-an...
Edit: grammar
These seem very poorly targeted towards me. Does everyone see only this? Are there ways to get into different/better advertising buckets? Even something like "GQ" would be far better than the "People" content I'm currently seeing.
On Instagram the ads are targeted at things I would actually click through and buy -- lots of ads for shoes, bags, clothing, kickstarter-like items, etc.
I assume that's via the hashtags and people I follow on Instagram: cars, travel, architecture, etc. + perhaps via some creepy FaceBook magic.
Without hashtags, how does Snapchat figure out what "Publishers" I'd want to see?
Hold down on a publisher story to get options.
Snapchat's targeting is deliberately vague (based on the presumed anonymity of the service) - which can be ok for brand-awareness campaigns, but bad for conversion campaigns, hence why you see it more tailored to puff-piece content over and above specific ecommerce.
Seemed like an interesting tool, but a harder one for SMEs to sign off on compared to IG/FB/Google.
Why would you want their ads targeted towards you? That means Snapchat would need to capture and analyze your information at the risk of your privacy. I'm totally fine with Kylie Jenner ads as long if it means my privacy is respected.
I'm not looking for targeted ads on Snapchat, but am looking to replicate that Instagram model of following non-IRL people/things that I like. I thought that's what the entire right Publishers tab was for, but (until today's update) I was only getting Kardashians there and had seemingly no way to promote anything else.
Or maybe I'm using Snapchat wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677666
Just curious, what did you think they were doing wrong and needed to fix?
On paper, neither Facebook nor TBS is an advertising company.
Advertising companies create and manage advertising campaigns; TBS and Facebook are media companies in different segments of the media whose primary income stream is through selling advertising space.
You're referring to an advertising agency
Would you consider Google a media company or are they an ad company.
>The one that isn't sucking in huge amounts of data is a clearly better to me.
But Snap is sucking in huge amounts of data. Your assumptions are false.
How is it a strawman? They both make revenue from selling attention.
>But Snap is sucking in huge amounts of data
Snap's ad-manager is no where near as sophisticated as FBs. Either we disagree on the definition of huge, or you have no idea what kind of targeting FB is capable of. When Snap has a js tag on almost every site then I'd might agree.
Most young people I know use Facebook for groups (local like a school or city), events , and chat. IMO Facebook is shooting all of these feet off with the algorithmic newsfeed and spinning off messenger.
Snap however is used constantly to keep up with peers. Haven't met a single person that uses instagram's stories, even though its usage numbers tell another story.
It really might just be my age/location/privlege bubble, but it consistently baffles me that Facebook keeps growing at such a faster speed than snap.
I asked my younger siblings and none of them nor their friends have facebooks, besides the one in college. They all have snap and insta, and spend ~2X time on snap than insta. Most text communication is snap or SMS.
Slack is much better, but Discord sunk its teeth into the gaming community and it spread.
Slack's extra features and integrations are nice, too, but I just don't like Discord because it... doesn't even work as advertised.
Pretty interface, easy to use, voice is pretty low latency (although I miss my mumble server), and it uses ~80mb of ram to sit in like 5 groups, which while not fantastic blows "rather open it in chrome" slack out of the water.
New signal desktop instantly uses 200mb and has to "loading messages" for 3s every single startup :(
On the whole, for a product proudly marketing itself as a Slack replacement, it does a terrible job actually providing the same functionality.
My preference is probably steam chat. The new signal desktop is a dumpster fire.
Most people in my age group simply don't spend very much time in front of a computer. Their phone is their portal to the internet and has generally everything they're looking for.
I'm not familiar with this, and the most prevalent Snapchat users among my friends are Android users.
Tencent bought 12% of Snap in Nov of 2017. Likely that has, and will continue to push emerging market efforts by Snap.
Talked to a friend yesterday who said that he forgot Snapchat even existed, and was installed on his phone, because he hadn't received a snap in a year.
Also, my younger siblings both use Snapchat and Messenger consistently, and are avid users of Facebook (because of meme tagging primarily).
On memes, I think for me and most of my friends something like 90% of facebook use is meme pages.
I think people that use facebook as a meme platform will move to different platforms when something offers pseudonymity with consistent user blocking (ie pseudonym that must be linked to a phone#) and solid group/forum posting + chat features. I think people are vaguely uncomfortable with putting their real name into "Red Commie Memes For Anti-State Teens" type groups and will want to move to pseudonymous or temporal (snap) platforms when they reach feature parity.
Right now facebook memes are growing fast because it is easy for "normie" facebook users to click a couple memes and get sucked into the vortex.
We have a population of 100 million.
The world is bigger than just the US.
Indonesia, with a population of 260 million, also overwhelmingly prefers Facebook over Snapchat.
Now you're shifting the goalposts.
But now that I think a little more, maybe we're starting to see a shift of say, tobacco + fast-food etc moving into poorer countries to extract $$ from them. So this mobile-game-social-addiction is the next/current step.
Instagram is also a behemoth compared to Snapchat. Same with Whatsapp and FBM.
Instagram and Facebook may have stories but the site is heavily predicated on pride/narcissism arms race with your "friends".
Even your biggest narcissist can only "win" for 24 hours on Snapchat and from what I can see they'll generally tap out of keeping up any facades to try and make others jealous about how (seemingly) great their life is within 4-5 weeks of using it and then join others in appreciating the little things that make life worth living.
Your own personal values and mileage may vary, but they've hit a niche with me.
People are quick to write off Snapchat's popularity with young users as it being the hot new toy they will tire with, but I think it's a lot deeper than that. They see the mistakes of millennials and older with social media and want nothing to do with it (and are thus nowhere to be found on Facebook, yet still on Instagram because it hasn't suffered the same problems yet). Snapchat avoids a lot of those pitfalls, though of course not without other problems. I think so long as that impermanence is the focus, and they allow for easy/simple communication between close friends (I'm worried about the non-chronological part for this exact reason), they will be a big part of the future of social media.
Facebook and the apps it owns have all tried towards that, but if the core is permanence (the classic profile, posts, walls, likes, comments), they will always be fighting a rising tide. Adding stories on top of that doesn't change the core use of the app.
I’d be interested to see data to support this assertion.
Do an experiment though. Look at all your friends around 17-18 (hard if you're older to get a good sample size, but find someone who has friends that age if possible). Now scroll through their walls and see when you hit 2016. I bet it's pretty quick in 75%+ cases.
I just did it on the few I have (siblings of college friends). One took 4 posts to get to 2015. Two of those were blocks of happy birthday posts grouped together. I know all of those people are very active on Instagram though.
Now if you can, look at people ages 23-25 or so. See how much more they post.
This is of course only data you can essentially get from being young and having access to friends in both ranges. But I see it time and time again.
I also put that cutoff at 19 for a reason based on my experience with others. I'm right on the border of millennial and whatever they decide comes after it. Most people my age used Facebook originally and evacuated gradually over the past 3-5 years. If you look at people 19 and under, they are barely to be found at all on Facebook since they would be aged 16-14 at the time of that evacuation, and thus have no need to evacuate if they never had an account they used in a significant manner.
I have a hard time believing that people under 18 are making a conscious decision on this, especially the 'see the mistakes of milennials' part. They're only concerned with themselves an their status in their group, just like millenials were, but on a different platform.
My early teen sister, for example, uses Instagram and Snapchat for two reasons: all het friends use it, my mom doesn't want her to use Facebook because it has a bad rep. The fact that Instagram is owned by Facebook is something that most people, outside of the well informed, are unaware of.
Their moms (say 26-36yo range here) are on facebook, post pictures of them, and like their posts. It's never going to be the youth platform as long as everything said is said in front of your mom, dad, grandma, and racist uncle.
Young people -desperately- want to take selfies that won't get dredged up 3 years later, and have been hearing about horror stories about people posting pictures of illicit or just immature activities since myspace. A kid who has been aware of their whole life is about <20yo.
getsetgold@gmail.com
I suppose it's a good thing; they're not wasting any of those views on people like me...
Like it or not, this is how FB bootstrapped their ads business (acai berry anyone?), and Snap is smart to capture the long tail of self-serve advertisers.