Snapchat is a trendy app that could easily become uncool, and when it does, I don't see how users feel much of a penalty for leaving in the same way FB users do.
What do you mean by this?
If you're not on FB and don't interact with your 'friends' frequently, people kinda forget you exist and stop talking to you, and friendships wither. Even geographically close friendships.
Kinda like being ostracised.
I am off FB for more than a year now, and I am just as much in contact with my friends as always.
I also can't point to any real studies; all I've got is anecdata, much like your personal experience.
That said, I have heard from multiple people variations on trying to quit or use it less, and getting grief from family and friends for not taking part. And I personally get passive-agressive commentary from my family for refusing to take part - "What did you think of - oh, that's right, you never saw [cousin]'s baby pictures because of your Facebook thing."
And for some, it's the only avenue I'd want to use.
If ones requirement is to maintain acquaintances, then fine. However, I was disputing the parent comment's assertion that leaving FB is akin to a punishment.
FB has more immediate ways to expand too, most likely. We already saw them transition from relying on getting a cut of things like plugins and games in FB to that not mattering at all. They could try to go into payments more, maybe an Adsense alternative -- likely the only company capable of doing so too. Yahoo failed at doing it a decade ago and any other company has always been much more niche with much more worse payouts.
Facebook is tracking to a ~31 PE ratio for fiscal 2017, with a growth rate that is still high.
$14 billion in net income (fiscal 2017 speculative), is a lot more important as a metric than $200 per user. If they push that net income up to $30 billion over the next four or five years (very plausible), at 24 times earnings (at that point, speculating on a $720b market cap), maybe their per user climbs to $300+ - it still won't matter, the net income is what will matter.
Snapchat doesn't possess any of the positive financial qualities that Facebook had, to square against the high per user value.
Even if Snap never gets much traction past people in their 30s, that's enough of a market to expand for quite a while. The 18-34 demographic is the most coveted. The pre-teen and teen market isn't something to completely sneeze at either.
Also it's private. Facebook is mainly used by people with friends and family. Celebrities/notable figures rarely interact with others outside of Twitter. But even with Twitter, the interactions are permanent -- even when tweets are deleted.
On and it's great for sexting, which let's not kid ourselves, was the original appeal and still is for a lot of people in their target demographic.
-Facebook, 2 billion MAU
-Messenger, 1.2 billion MAU
-WhatsApp, 1.2 billion MAU
-Instagram, 700 million MAU
Messenger, on its own, is easily a $50 billion company.
WhatsApp presently has none revenue either.
Full disclosure, I've never used either FB Messenger or WeChat, but I do use WhatsApp, so I'm just basing this on what I hear.
On market opposition, I think the biggest obstacle are the payment vendors, specifically Visa and Mastercard. Alipay and WeChat wallet had an easy time taking off because they weren't competing against credit cards. Visa makes so much money in its present rent-seeking market position they have no incentive to innovate.