Instagram Stories alone already outpaces Snap 200M to 166M. Looks like an uphill battle from here.
http://www.thefader.com/2017/04/14/instagram-stories-more-po...
I wonder what the number would be if those who only watched stories were excluded. Its also worth considering that Instagram delivers some of their announcements as stories and whether or not people viewing those also count towards the active user number.
edit: I'm curious if this is true only for my friend groups/demographic/principal component, poll here: http://www.strawpoll.me/12939274
It might make for a better user experience but that's not good for a free service
I'd argue though the only thing keeping them in the game is network effects and fighting that fight vs IG is... going to be challenging.
It's a very tiny percentage so far - maybe 1-2% of my contacts list - but it is being used.
If this gets to about 10%, Snapchat should be worried. Whatsapp has a massive user base in developing countries.
I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else absolutely hates this new stories thing Facebook is pinching from Snapchat.
Every damn time I pull down (Messenger on iOS) to reload the conversation list I end up at the damn camera. That's not how literally every other app works.
Now Facebook (iOS app) has updated and it feels like whenever I accidentally drag my thumb slightly in a non-specific direction across the screen the damn camera opens there too.
Bring on the next social network. This one's getting all gross and gooey.
Facebook has shown an impressive flexibility and willingness to pay the costs of making big changes when they need to, e.g., acquiring WhatsApp or shifting their product toward Stories. Still, a startup go a really long way by building a product that carries "not Facebook" as a key value proposition.
In the temporary image space, virtually all of the innovation has come from that company, whether it's the initial concept, expanding scope with stories, adding visual effects, etc.
In the end, it might not matter. Facebook repeatedly cloned Snapchat's features, starting with the Poke app in 2012 that Zuck reportedly wrote code for himself.
The result? They jammed it into all of their products (Insta, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.) and seem to be riding the network effect to success.
Not saying that smaller players can't win, but man, brute force and a big network were really effective this time.
From a consumer perspective, it's disappointing that Facebook controls itself and now this arena. It's gonna be hard to find innovation when purchasing and cloning are the way to do business.
In some circles, having an Instagram is as expected as having Facebook, which makes abstaining difficult.
Welcome to Microsoft circa 1990. People forget how much oxygen Microsoft could suck out of a space simply by mentioning they were going to develop something.
This is a very scary situation, where patents were originally developed to prevent exactly this.
As so many like to say: they idea matters less than the speed and strength of execution. It's clear that the network effects of Facebook makes it very difficult to compete, but is the problem really that they are copying features from other products, or is that just the symptoms of a bigger issue?
Facebook effectively has a monopoly on the digital social network, no matter how many millennials say it's "not cool anymore" – they're still on it.
My personal hypothesis is that this is because we lack a decentralized identity feature on the internet. For better or worse, Facebook and Google solved that problem, and now everything you do is connected to either your Facebook account or gmail. It doesn't matter if you don't have those accounts, becasue everyone else does, more or less, and they're locked in. You can't bring your identity with you. Sure you can close your account and possibly download your data, but if you do that you sever the connections, which is the true valuable bit of the network – the nodes less so.
I really don't like the sheer dominance of Google and Facebook, but I have no idea how to get away from it either. Makes me small just thinking about it.
Snap used to have an advantage in terms of age group. I'm curious if this is still the case.
Anecdotally I've heard from my partner that Instagram effectively duplicated a core feature of Snapchat to the point she no longer sees the point of Snapchat. But she always saw Snapchat as a side novelty, largely because she used Instagram well before Snapchat.
But I also see this as an age group thing, Snapchat had the image of being popular with high school kids while Instagram had penetrated the university-30yr old category most effectively. So it's hard to say merely as an outside spectator. As well as being geographically limited in my perspective.
Unseating Facebook is a very different play from merely innovating.
I'm disappointed by anemic growth: Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year. They have ~2B users [1]
This q Snapchat had growth of ~5% which will be about ~20% per year. But they are 10x smaller than Facebook.
[1] Facebook 5/3/17 earning report
That's nearly 2/3 of people on the planet with Internet connections, according to estimates by the ITU (approx 3B internet users by the end of 2016) [0]. Even if I believed that user figure, which I dont, there is no way Facebook can grow at the same rate for much longer.
[0] http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFa...
I've done some pretty substantial traveling throughout Asia, and just about everyone with a smartphone that I've met also has a Facebook account (excluding China).
In Myanmar (aka Burma) the strict military government restricted internet usage until they turned over control of the government last year. Most people are (within the last 12-24 months) using the internet for the first time! Most have never used a computer, and they only know the internet from an (Android) smartphone. However, every single person who I talked to there who had a smartphone had a Facebook.
The one local I talked to most in depth about this had never used Google! He said he didn't know how to use Google, and he didn't think he needed it. I explained what Google can help with: searching for information, reading news, etc. He showed me that he read news and did searches for things all from within the Facebook app.
I saw similar usage of Facebook in other developing Asian countries (Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia), where people used Facebook as a kind of substitute for a web browser / search engine.
You and I would never think to use Facebook as our internet portal, but it seems to be a very sticky and powerful tool for many of those just coming online.
This is the most frightening thing I've read in a while.
Now, I am not saying google is the perfect answer, but I consider it a hell of a lot better than facebook.
Maybe that's what it is. "Quality content" and "Facebook" in the same sentence sounds absurd.
Google also linking to the web after ads or their own stuff is a benefit over FB of course. But I don't see that being Google's focus.
The cesspool of fake news, Trump gossip, etc, turning into hot topics amongst Myanmar's budding online culture is sad, like a virus spreading.
Another worrisome side effect is the quick adoption of the medium by hate groups inciting violence towards religious minorities with outright lies compounded by the fact that most Myanmar users don't yet know fact checking is possible thanks to the walled garden.
Some users have landed in jail for not realizing posts containing jests about government officials were viewable by said authorities. The country's speech laws are still evolving and users struggle to understand brand new ceoncepts like scoping of comments.
Interesting times...
[1]. https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru...
In my opinion, opportunity is better than equality.
FB does not categorically improve the quality of life for its users. FB provides connectivity to others... this is good. But if the cost is making you think the world is askew from what it really is because all you see is what FB's feed shows you... well that's a steep price that nobody, even the poor, should be asked to pay.
It really does have that many users. Even if a solid 20% of them are all fake accounts (which I don't think the percentage is that high), it's still a large part of the connected world.
There's a reason Facebook is developing technology to bring the rest of the unconnected world online. It's because they know they'll reach a point where they'll have the whole connected market, and the only way forward is to grow the market to it's full potential.
Don't let your hatred of the product or company blind your understanding of its scale and influence on the world (both positive and negative).
The Yellow pages had a similar story not too long ago...
I'll give you one data point. When I was in college, we had a Facebook group for every single class and they were extremely valuable. We also used Facebook events heavily for various on-campus events. This too was extremely valuable. Now that I'm out of college, I have less affinity with those products from Facebook but I gravitate towards different parts of the site now.
Either way, you can say that your life would not materially change for the better or worse if Facebook fell off the face of the internet tomorrow. That's a valid opinion to hold. But don't make the folly of generalizing a global product that is so incredibly pervasive in ways that we can't fully understand. I'm not saying that this reality is a good thing, nor am I saying it's a bad thing. However we can have better conversations about the effect Facebook has than "Facebook is useless", "Zuck is a spy", "I deleted my account, fuck FB", "All their metrics are fake", "Something something Myspace".
Those simply aren't interesting statements anymore. They just aren't. They're tired and have been repeated year after year for more than a decade.
In fact this is how I think of them and their business interests; they are nothing more than merchants of human attention (like Google). After all, the bulk of their revenues comes directly from ads.
VR may be toy-like tech for a lot of people today, but Zuckerberg is betting on it to be the next big frontier for computing similar to how they doubled-down on mobile with the emergence of touch screens heralded by the iPhone.
How much social media activity/growth is not human?
As much as I agree with you, that kind of activity especially by first party or those related is called market manipulation. SEC and investors won't take lightly to it.
On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser.
Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even make them look "Kinda real" with markov chain driven text input. Super, duper easy.
Your blithe comment has some merit on its surface -- I also "think" it seems trivial to do account fraud at a large scale -- but it pattern matches against the "I can build Stack Overflow in a weekend" mode. I can only guess, but I imagine the difficulty factor going from 500 to 1 million bots is much greater than 200x higher. (As in, if there are 1,000,000 people right now on Earth who could do the former, I suspect there are way fewer than 1mm/500 for the latter.)
There are undoubtedly bot networks that operate (although we have no idea for how long), at a scale that would likely surprise me. However, even that doesn't make the data useless (especially when frequently cited against a previous measurement).
Finally, your non-sequitur about markets being controlled by HFT bots hit a number of negative heuristics in my brain.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/facebook-average-revenue-per-...
I disagree a little with Bloomberg here, the numbers are bad (active users isn't great), but given the same number of users you'd expect advertising revenue (which is what they're driven by) to be down Q1 vs Q4. Ad budgets and spending is cyclical and seasonal, far more money is thrown at the wall during the holiday period than after.
The fact that they have you and your daughter engaging with the product at all is a meaningful thing for the business. There's a lot they can do with even this cursory engagement over time.
I am not a Snap user period. To count my daughter as a user is just plain sad from an investment point of view. She is not going to have a job for 9 years minimum. That means I control the purse strings.
Sanp is like those games that have a gajillion users and then simply die as no one plays them anymore.
(And the fact that there was a monetary transaction for the paper is not unlike going through the pains of downloading and installing an app on your phone.)
That means roughly this:
* It's a funnel (one that is heavily tracked)
* They know how often and how deep users' engagement patterns are and how they shift over time, over different feature launches, and over the age of their users among other parameters.
* They know what it takes to get a lightly engaging user to become one that is more deeply engaging and they know the rate at which this conversion happens.
* They have cohorts of users and they know what types of users move which way through the funnel and how fast.
* Using all this data, they have at their disposal different levers to pull (growth, marketing, product) to move the numbers in the right direction.
Again, all of this doesn't mean that Snapchat will be successful in converting you or your daughter into a heavy Snapchat user today or even tomorrow. But you're painting too simple of a picture using a single high level metric and logical simplification of a process that's very complicated.
The biggest point I want to make here is that NO TWO USERS ARE THE SAME. So to use a high level metric that conflates different types of users by definition and then making an implication about the health of a company using this specific metric's weakness is just silly. There is data that you don't have access to and you're not recognizing that.
Not trying to come across as snarky, but trying to setup an easy analogy :).
When are we going to say; What the hell is the point of this? Users "using" something doesn't make it profitable unless they are willing to pay you for it. Furthermore, advertising IS NOT working. Look at retail, malls AND name brands... Horrible performance for the bulk of recent memory.
My parents, older relatives...everyone I know is on Facebook or Whatsapp.
But they will never use Snapchat.
Snapchat's users are only going to be younger. This makes them an attractive investment 10 years down the line, but not right now.
Snap's shtick is that it's not Facebook, that your parents aren't on it, that your creepy uncle's friend who came to the bbq last 4th of July is NOT there and that Snap is not going to geo-recommend you add him as a friend...that's the point and the main reason it got so popular so quick.
How you monetize that? Dunno, but it will sure make your app popular.
Things like ebitda have a pretty standard audit procedure, there are bank statements and receipts that an auditor can check, and they can investigate variances.
DAU doesn't seem to have a precise definition, and how do we know the method for collecting this metric is accurate? I've personally stuffed up this kind of collection before, and once you do it's very hard to backfill.
Likewise Facebook has had several prominent advertising metric failures, how can we trust their DAU number?
At the end of the day it's just something that the board have defined and decided to use, and if they mess up the collection then it's embarrassing for them, they lose credibility, and investors will sell or install a new board.
Even for things that have (more) precise definitions like profit or earnings, how does one know that the numbers are not deliberately or accidentally incorrect? You just have to trust the board, accountants, and auditors to do their job, and if you don't you shouldn't own the stock.
> Adjusted Ebitda Loss $188.2M, Est. Loss $176.9M
> 1Q Daily Active Users 166M, Est. 168M
> 1Q Rev. $149.6M, Est. $158.6M
> 1Q Loss/Shr $2.31
I'm guessing the big issue is the miss on Daily active users. This is the same thing that caused the street ot hammer twitter.
Rule of thumb for non profitable tech companies....
If you are a company that isn't making a profit and you continually preach look at the users, look at the users. and then fail to even hit your target on that, you're going to get punished.....heavily.
Or put another way, you can either make a profit or make your non GAAP numbers, but you have to atleast hit one of the two.
One other issue from the Bloomberg momentary....
> A very key number here is revenue per user. Snap's results today are indicating average revenue per user at 90 cents. This is down from $1.05 (14%) from what it reported for Q4 2016, before its IPO.
To be completely fair, SNAP management wanted full control to build for the long term and Facebook was down 12% after their first earnings report and Twitter was down 24% so it might just be that its painful for rookie CEOs to manage a public company.
Too bad for employees that this comes before the lock up period ends.
EDIT
Just on the earnings call, they said they don't break out Spectical's numbers but the revenue it generated was about $8 Million.