Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the Doubters to Keep Mum

Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by doublerebel on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:33PM (#15677457)

I still think Snap is a good long play because so far they are the only social network to "get" Augmented Reality. Google has already had multiple AR missteps (Glass, Tango, Pokemon Go via Niantic), Facebook is playing AR copycat, Microsoft's AR is targeting big industry.

Snap's entertainment experience puts the viewer in the center of the action, similar to VR 360° experiences and Spectacles is a direct expression of that understanding. Snap's AR advertising (sponsored filters) has been an overwhelming success. I don't think a real competitor has emerged for Snap yet, as long as they stay the course.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by rm999 on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:53PM (#15677543)

First, that's a feature, not a product.

Second, there's no barrier to entry there. Facebook's ~10000 engineers can recreate features with amazing swiftness, do it better than the first movers, then spread the feature quickly through its 1 billion+ user social network. If Facebook wants to beat snapchat at the AR game, they will do it when they feel like it.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/13/instagram-stories-bigger-t...

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by yalph on Saturday November 11, 2017 @09:21PM (#15679346)

You mean like how Google+ replaced FB?

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by _nedR on Saturday November 11, 2017 @10:22PM (#15679494)

Thats a product, not a feature.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by willmw101 on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:48PM (#15677526)

Pokemon Go probably shouldn't be considered a misstep given it surpassed $1.2b in revenue and over 750 million downloads earlier this summer. Also as another poster notes below, AR is pretty wide open with both Instagram (FB) finding success with the exact same AR features/lenses as Snap, as well as apple integrating AI in to their most recent iOS release.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by this_user on Saturday November 11, 2017 @03:09PM (#15677890)

SNAP has already lost $40 mn on Spectacles, because they don't sell. This does not seem to be a strategy that is actually going to work. Meanwhile, Instagram Stories now has more users than Snap, and Snap's user growth has stalled, coming in below expectations for the second quarter in a row. So far they have also failed to improve their Android experience, which is not helping. At this point, SNAP seems more like TWTR than FB, except they don't have the kind of relevance, and therefore staying power, that the former has. Unless they can come up with a strategy for a turnaround, they may be dead in five years.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by Analemma_ on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:36PM (#15677470)

Apple just commoditized AR by adding it as a set of iOS APIs that anyone can use, so that's an awfully shallow moat for Snap to rely on.

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Re:Snap’s Rise and Fall: How a Big, Splashy IPO Prompted the... by doublerebel on Saturday November 11, 2017 @01:46PM (#15677517)

Adding filters to a camera is a very different market compared to sustaining a social network on it. Look at Hipstamatic vs Instagram.

It's not just creating a feature, it's understanding why someone would want to use it. That's the difference between a product and a business.

Most of HN is too old and otherwise not the Snap demographic. How many of you actually use Snapchat with your friends and watch the videos with your headphones in? The experience is key -- the business facets being analyzed are a symptom of the experience.

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