Like nick, I'm close to 30 years old too. Snap is big in all my social circles. Mostly people between mid 20s to early 30s. Less popular the older you get, but still significant. Regardless, all have enough buying power.

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.

Popular does not mean profitable! I feel like the tech industry has confused the two over and over again.

Of course. But getting popular is an important part of being a big social media company. Profits of $100M on under $1B in revenue isn't going to help things much for Snap if that's not growing because they don't have enough users.

Anecdotal: I, and a large chunk of my friends and acquaintances use snapchat regularly. We're 30 year olds making good money. In the same way that some messages are best suited for a text message, some for an email, and some for a phone call, there are some messages where snapchat is the best medium.

For what kinds of messages is snapchat the best medium? I've tried using it but can't understand its purpose.

I described it in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14740274

that's not the appeal. Snapchat is coveted by it's users because of ephemerality. It grew in reaction to your parents being on fb; in reaction to public, permanent social communication. The users love it because they think it's more authentic - that they're not rehearsing for a contrived selfie or food porn. It's cool cuz they're shooting the shit and not going for likes, and no one outside their sphere is gonna see it.

Everything you said other than ephemerality applies to every other messaging platform, including Facebook Messenger. How does ephemerality help you shoot the shit better than a text message?

I believe FB messenger now has secret/disappearing messages as a response to snapchat, but before that it was a pretty clear distinction: if I send you a goofy selfie on snapchat it's gone in 10 seconds. If I send you a goofy selfie on messenger, you could always scroll up to see it again. And share it with others if you so choose.

I guess the part I'm missing is why you care whether the goofy selfie disappears.

It's psychological. As soon as you put something on FB, Twitter, etc. it's no longer "yours". Snapchat makes conversations and pictures disposable. It's just fast and ugly. And it powers the app by nudging by users into creating content to send to a friend without having to worry about rehearsing for the perfect picture/tweet/etc.

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.

Ya, you're not getting it. First, a transcript of your communication is not desirable to many (if you find this puzzling, it's because you're old :P). Second, FB Messenger or any chat client you have to manage the groups (forget it).

How are Snapchat's group messages different? I thought it only did one-on-one.

because it's not? Snapchat stories dude - that is the real conversation.

So, like a WhatsApp group basically? Being able to send photos to a specific subset of your contacts?

It's whatsapp if the photos disappeared in 10 seconds so that nobody could save copies of unrehearsed (but I'd argue genuine) moments.

Yes, this ^. I don't understand it either, and I'm not even THAT old. Perhaps you need to be American to get Snap? No clue.