I didn't dig into the financials all that much, or even listen to call so I'm approaching this from a place of ignorance, but I do happen to have five or six family members between the ages of 13 and 18 and all of them have unanimously reported to me that Snapchat is unequivocally over.
That's as anecdotal as it gets, but I'm also hard pressed to believe that they're all simultaneously unique. And as we've seen elsewhere in tech, once the "cool" vibe is gone (Yahoo, AOL, etc.), it's a long spiral to irrelevance.
If you read Hacker News and Reddit, it's obvious that Facebook is about to die. People are put off by its privacy issues, its outlandishly aggressive efforts to keep you clicking, and its culpability in tilting information and elections to shady actors.
But I'd probably make a bet than they'll reach 3bn before long.
This is a diff world and company than MySpace. Calling it 2.0 is misguided at best.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15880494/facebook-2-billi...
I was trying to suggest that a lot of those "users" are not sources of income/data. I'll bet a lot of them are either bots, or humans smart enough to use an ad blocker. And most of the MAU humans are probably in a 10-year age range, having signed up when FB was useful.
I have to admit a lot of surprised how quickly Instagram got to parity and overtook Snapchat with my family, but I'm at least two decades out of that demographic so that's probably more of me being old and out of it than anything else!
That said, Snap could fix a lot of things and grow revenue and the stock could still not move - they're at about the same market cap of Twitter with a fraction of the revenue and user growth that is similarly stalling
There seems to be a hard boundary with reaching the demographic of users in developed nations and both Snap and Twitter are there
I think Twitter and snap are very different. Snap is a messenger app and has the same potential as FB messenger or wechat. Twitter will never be that. The latest news has Tencent making a strategic investment and bringing chinese style monetization to Snapchat. I'm very optimistic about this.
If they have ~3 more quarters like the last one then they're insolvent. There may be a real opportunity here but not enough time to execute on it (especially given that every early employee can walk away now)