I wonder how many people here are aware of Snapchat's thriving underground OnlyFans-like ecosystem. I also wonder how much of that is driving Snap's user metrics.
As far back as 2014, I remember there being a huge ecosystem of "premium" snaps (sometimes known as "prem(ium) girls"), whereby you would pay the account owner a one time or recurring fee for access to a "premium" snapchat account where the owner posts nudes/etc, essentially OnlyFans-like content. Owner would typically accept payment through any number of ways (paypal/cashapp being most common), and "customer" would provide proof of payment by sending screenshot of receipt that the owner then confirms.
The premium account owner would also typically have a free/open account where they would post free content / teasers/etc, essentially marketing/advertising for their premium account. They would sometimes also market their account on Twitter and Reddit and especially Tinder (and one less popular app by the name of Whisper), much like OnlyFans content creators do today.
As far as I know, this preceded the popularity of OnlyFans and remains a popular use case for Snapchat. I don't use Snapchat much myself nowadays, but I used to be a customer of many of these premium snaps years ago. When I do log in once in a while, many of these accounts are still active, though some are also advertising their OnlyFans.
I think Snap officially bans this practice, but by nature these accounts are private and the owner adds users on a one by one basis, so I don't imagine they get reported a whole lot.
The fact that the content is ephemeral surely helps and is probably one of the main reasons the content creators choose Snap as their platform. Snap also tells you when users screenshot your content, which would often result in getting banned from the premium Snap. Unlike OnlyFans, which cannot get in the AppStore and is relegated to being web-only, Snapchat is mobile-only, making it harder for users to download the content, which is another appeal for these "premium" content creators.
What I don't get is why Snap never tried to build a good product around that and give creators (uhmm) a good way to monetize their profiles. This seems like such an obvious thing to do to me. Why would you give up on that usage and allow it to move to OnlyFans and other platforms if you already have it? And even more, penalize your audience for such practice. And same question to Instagram team (I left the company a while back so don't know the current thinking). If anybody with insider knowledge can comment even top-level, would be much appreciated.
Are there any good examples of product that maintains popularity within youth / teen markets while enabling monetisation of adult content?
It seems near an impossibility.
From a product perspective it would be possible, tho it’d be playing with fire. Very different when young people see adult content and you ban it vs they see the adult content you condone but you didn’t intend them to reach. (And they will try to).
But from the perception perspective, even harder. When adults (some parents) see snap as an adult entertainment product, they are not going to want kids using it. Even if there’s some suitable product barrier between the audiences.
Because they are a public company and institutional shareholders wouldn't let them.
Before going public they wouldn't have been able to pass it by VCs already invested or raise any more capital. OnlyFans has this problem.
Even if they had offered it early they would have struggled the same way OnlyFans did recently over payments, and with no way to police it on their technology probably would have been embattled with media and public perception way worse.
Banks, investors and other companies don't want to deal with Pornography and sex workers despite the massive proliferation online.
They wouldn't have been able to have all their partnerships, generate revenue from other sources or have apps either.
Probably because being open about allowing adult content will risk advertisers on the rest of the platform and the loss of those advertisers might outweigh the revenue from OnlyFans type profiles.
Apple does not allow adult content on the app store. For example, OnlyFans does not have an iOS app as a result. If Snap were to openly embrace adult content, they could risk getting booted from the app store.
I tried to use their filters for Zoom / Teambuildings (yes, It's tacky, I know) but had to realize that their filter discovery just doesn't work on the MacOS (at least)
Some other things to mention: the premium content is almost exclusively in the form of stories, which disappear after 24 hours of course. Sometimes creators offer extra services at an additional fee or if you buy a lifetime membership or whatnot (duck/face rates, custom photos/videos, phone calls, etc), all of which go through the Snap app. Some even have a menu which they re-post on their stories daily ($20 for a custom 3 minute video, $10 for a 5 minute phone call, etc, etc). Sometimes these are also sold as "packages". Photo/video archives in the form of links to folders on mega.nz and similar websites are other assets commonly sold this way.
It's kind of still amusing to me that Snapchat ever moved beyond being a niche platform like that. Heck, I might still have an account, but the only reason I ever did was around 2012 or so when I first divorced and started seeing women again, they offered to send nudes, but only via Snapchat. What other purpose could a service that let you send disappearing pictures serve? It was clearly for sending nudes. Watching them become a VC darling and totally rebrand to something for kids was surreal.
I'm kind of sad at your scenario, though. Receiving pictures from someone I actually got to meet and go on dates with was quite a bit more personal and fulfilling than subscribing to a mass semi-public feed from a professional adult performer. Pros always have to ruin everything.
Interesting question. The answer is because people pay to have quasisocial relationships with the OnlyFans providers. On other sites with just videos, you don't get that same feeling.
Basically, people are lonely and will pay to feel seen, heard, or loved.
Is your argument that there is enough free random porn to make it not worth paying for OnlyFans?
The reason I would pay for OnlyFans content, if I could afford it, is that there are specific creators on there that I find particularly attractive, either physically or personality-wise, and I would love to help fund their lifestyle.
My survey of 1 teenager, my 15 year old daughter, reveals that it is the preferred messaging platform for her friends and others at her school. Due to one of her activities she travels regularly along the east coast and a few times a year to other locations across the US. When she makes friends during the trips the preferred means to stay in touch from both parties is SnapChat. So I tend to believe the numbers being thrown about. She used to make some Tiktok videos and checked it regularly. She hasn't made a video in almost a year and unless something is shared with her never checks the app. This seems to be the trend among most of her friends. When I asked her why it was because everyone's parents are now on Tiktok.
It’s funny how it’s always the young at the forefront of new tech and rapidly disappear as soon as their parents start getting on the platform. I kinda get this; I used to be on Facebook a lot, then my parents got on there, then all their age group, and that’s when both the experience started sucking (ads love older people with money) and the interactions started sucking (more weird/angry political nonsense/conspiracy shit).
The best parts of Twitter are amongst professional circles where people use their real names and can provide unique insight into topics that you would never get anywhere else. For example all of the open source intelligence with Ukraine or learning about the intricacies of Brexit from actual trade negotiators.
Whereas if you look at Reddit right now it is inundated with posts about the Depp/Heard case. And there is a visceral hatred towards Heard which is being driven by socially awkward, young men who are self-radicalising. It's really scary to watch.
"he best parts of Twitter are amongst professional circles where people use their real names"
Real names don't mean anything. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram have people with real names and there's still disgusting behavior and rude interactions. Real names don't mean anything when you're reduced from a person to pixels on a screen, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles.
Reddit provides solace in that people can have more longform, nuanced discussions under an anonymous handle. So they don't have random people scouring through every post of theirs and pulling words out of context, like some witchhunters are doing with old emails.
"Whereas if you look at Reddit right now it is inundated with posts about the Depp/Heard case."
There wouldn't be much to discuss if the case were being handled fairly.
Instead, you've got one party on tape actually admitting abuse of their partner, and yet the victim is the one who loses their career and has magazines printing lies about them. I want you to envision the public reaction to the case if the genders were reversed here.
Any reasonable person can see that this situation is a clear example of unfair double standards, which is why it's being discussed so much. There are double standards for men and women, and I'd wager nearly every man alive right now knows about the double standards men face. That is why reddit, a male-dominated space, is highly interested in this case. This doesn't mean that women don't face double standards, of course, but reddit is not really able to discuss that well.
> So they don't have random people scouring through every post of theirs and pulling words out of context, like some witchhunters are doing with old emails.
2. He's extremely rich and clearly spoiled with household expenses exceeding 1m per month.
3. He has a career long history of infantile/destructive behavior - lots of which predates this case. I recall these reports from when I was a teen in the 1990s.
4. Culturally not a single thing he has worked on gives me the slightest interest in him.
If someone wanted to engage my sympathies they certainly would not make me identify with such a person.
As for the rest it sounds like an American problem so I'll leave that to the citizens of that great country to thrash out for themselves.
Okay — but to American men this situation comes across as:
“Not even the fantastically wealthy Johnny Depp, who we grew up loving as Captain Jack, with all his wealth can defend himself against the false accusations of a clearly lying woman.”
Do you really not understand how that would be radicalizing for people who saw Pirates of the Caribbean as kids and who faced similar sexism in their personal lives?
To me, your position comes across as “I can’t personally relate to a victim, so I’m dismissing the concerns and experiences of an entire group.”
> “Not even the fantastically wealthy Johnny Depp, who we grew up loving as Captain Jack, with all his wealth can defend himself against the false accusations of a clearly lying woman.”
Yes he is clearly an outlier and what he is experiencing should not be taken as indicative of anything other than the whims of celebrity culture. It has 0 bearing on what “regular” people will experience.
Except that this case is resonating precisely because those kinds of false accusations against men are used in divorce and family courts routinely. What happened to Johnny Depp happens to men in courtrooms across America every day.
This isn’t a case of “celebrity culture” — but rather, a case of the average American experience intruding on celebrity culture.
It’s absolutely not representative of anything people face in divorce courts. This comment makes me believe you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Have you actually been in a divorce proceeding? Your case will get thrown out for lying.
I witnessed my mother use these exact tactics in divorce and family court and I’ve seen the same used against friends — so yes.
I would encourage you to do more research: that kind of lying is common, as the attorneys that work family law and commentate on the Virginia case have noted — in the two panel shows I linked elsewhere. [1]
> This comment makes me believe you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Have you actually been in a divorce proceeding?
I have the same opinion of your comment that denies the reality of divorce/family courts:
You come across as not actually knowing how these things work.
> with all his wealth can defend himself against the false accusations of a clearly lying woman
UK court found Heard's accusations to be credible. And Depp is more than capable of filing an appeal and taking it to higher courts if he believes there have been substantive issues with the court proceedings.
But until that happens it should be assumed that he did indeed abuse her.
Depp was found by a UK court to have assaulted Heard, on a dozen occasions and put her in “fear for her life” three times [1]. So for me it seems clear that they are both abusive and not worthy of anyone's time.
But my point was that the Depp/Heard issue has very much crossed the line into being completely irrational and morphed into a generalised anti-women sentiment. And it's very much radicalising the younger men in particular on Reddit in ways you don't see on other social media platforms.
I think the reason you’re not understanding is because you don’t understand the facts that are driving their behavior — behavior which makes sense when you view this trial as “not even Johnny Depp can get justice when a woman lies about him”.
I find it genuinely interesting that you assume a group is irrational rather than consider you’ve been misinformed.
There are many flaws in the UK case, involving the judge discounting the evidence of third parties while taking at face value the claims of Ms Heard.
I would suggest watching the feed or summaries of the Virginia case, with Rekeita Law and Legal Bytes being two prominent channels covering the trial — both featuring panels of attorneys commenting on the case.
Lots of people showing their age in this thread. The discussion is essentially "I and my social group don't use Snapchat therefore their numbers are fake". If you go talk to people under 25 you will see a very different picture. Snapchat and TikTok are dominating the social media landscape.
I don't think it's just age - people here have a tendency to live in a tech bubble regardless of age. I'm under 25 and I've never used Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and I think it's because I live in an out-of-touch bubble.
Despite ideas that at college you're supposed to meet people different to you, my college experience mainly consisted of me finding "my people" i.e. tech-obsessed nerds who use Reddit, Hacker News, IRC, Signal, and Discord. And that bubble only got more bubbly when I got internships and jobs at tech companies.
I don't want to project too hard, but it's easy to see how a site like HN could attract lots of people like that who don't engage with Snapchat regardless of age.
Does TikTok really remain that popular with the younger generation? I know content creators use it, but I'd expect most kids would prefer to keep content private. Is it really that popular for regular kids?
Truthfully, whenever I open Instagram or TikTok it's almost entirely thirst-traps in my timeline. But maybe that's just how the algorithm has been trained for me.
The most interesting part is that “educational” outnumbers “lol” by about 5 to 4. I learn a lot on TikTok — more than Twitter. Of course, HN is still #1 for that (especially for depth) but production quality has been ramping up. TikTok recently emailed 10 minute videos, and it’s a matter of time till they do creator partnerships.
I'm in college. I see a lot of people doubting snap's popularity in this thread.
Literally everyone has snapchat and most people use it on a daily basis. I do think they provide the overall best group chat experience out of any app, you can just send text if you want, but also save funny pictures or video that people send. And only the good stuff gets saved, so you're usually not dealing with a bunch of clutter and random irrelevant content in the chat's history. The private stories are cool too, but I personally don't use them.
As a user of Snapchat since high school (now 25), I’m noticing a resurgence in my friends using the platform. I never left because I never joined Instagram due to my distain for Facebook. Snap is a great app to keep in contact with “real” friends. I only have groups with true friends and only watch my friends’ stories.
My teenagers use Snapchat regularly, and Snap Maps seem to be the "killer app" for them. It allows them to see which of their friends are around when they travel or are out and about on the weekends.
Instead of a feed of stories in an order being able to see thumbnails of stories over a map and clicking around the map would be far more engaging for me.
It would also help me alot as a digital nomad/traveller as it would very quickly let me know which friends are in which cities/countries, as opposed to just the same street as others have suggested.
Similarly if you want to know what XXX bar or street is like right now you could see public stories from there.
Just landed in a city? Browse the Instagram map to get an idea which streets are party to visit/avoid or see random pics of food and think fuck let's go there.
I think it's more about the UX. I don't actively use either platform but the experience of asking "I wonder where my friends are", going to a map and going "huh, I guess I know someone currently in XYZ place" is pretty different from having to search for a place.
I think what those groups like about Snap Maps is that it can show not only where your friends are but what they're doing. Imagine if you were having drinks at a bar and a friend posted a snap of them doing the same just a few blocks away -- I'd reach out to meet up with them.
yeah I like that aspect of Snap Maps too but it lacked usefulness when everyone stopped using it no matter how densely populated the area was or where my friends are. I'm glad to know people are using it again and posting relevant snaps.
Protip: for those not looking for their own friends specifically, you can/could use snapmaps without a snapchat account, just in your browser and see the feed of whats happening in the heatmap.
Snapchat is fun for stupid pics between friends that are meant to be ephemeral, and that’s why I like it. It’s the last social platform where my friends are creating the majority of their content posted as opposed to re-sharing something.
HOWEVER- their “discover” pane is full of the most repugnant, degenerate, or otherwise braindead bullshit I have ever seen in my life. If I could pay to turn it off permanently they could command a significant sum for me.
It feels like their discover pane is what happens when you choose to promote (and generate) content entirely based on optimizing for clicks and ignore any long-term retention or engagement implications
My 20yo son in college still uses Snap, and I just checked and apparently he still has 3 streaks that are at 1500 days(ish). That's 4+ years of daily Snapping.
Snap has apparently become a vital part of dating. Tinder to discover and Snap to chat. That makes sense to a generation used to not having their conversations and selfie messages permanently logged.
There's some serious Sugar Baby and OnlyFan action going on as well via Snap. The only time I, as a 50yo, on Tinder get a girl's Snap is when she wants to sell nude pics or talk about an "arrangement".
(This is an entirely different topic, but the Zoomers are first generation to grow up with easy 24/7 access to hardcore porn, and I think it has definitely given them different ideas of relationships and sex than previous generations, and I think we haven't even begun to see the long term effects of this. 19yos talking about ENM? Or BDSM preferences? Craziness.)
Snap is an amusing generational thing because if I hadn't seen my son using it every day for years, I totally would have dismissed it. It's just an app that I have no use for. No history? I have a horrible memory! That's a nightmare app to me.
That's all, just thought I'd share. If you're my age and don't get Snap? That's understandable, just don't dismiss it. To the Zoomers it's part of daily life.
I always cheer for Snapchat just because of the courage it took to turn down Zuckerberg's $3 billion offer in 2013.
If you compare Evan Spiegel to Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder), Spiegel is 6 times richer and he didn't have to kowtow to Zuckerberg for all those years. Hopefully that's a lesson to founders to go for it, build something real and don't sell out.
It's not as straightforward a comparison. Instagram is still worth 3-5x more than Snapchat today. It's not obvious that they would have seen the same growth had they stayed independent.
It seems pretty straightforward to me from the perspective of the founder. Would you rather:
A) Be worth $6.6bn and have control of your company, with people generally crediting the company's success with your leadership
or
B) Be worth $1.6bn and have your (former) company be a division of Zuck's empire that's technically worth 3-5x more to shareholders, but (as you just demonstrated) people generally say that it would be worth far less if Facebook hadn't acquired it?
I think Kevin Systrom probably doesn't give a shit about how much Instagram contributes to Meta's market cap these days, but I imagine that he _does_ care about the impact of Instagram on global culture. At the $1bn+ level, it's all about power and legacy. Evan Spiegel has retained the power to shape his legacy.
The problem is you don't know in 2012 that these are the two options. Obviously no one with the power of foresight is going to choose option B, so I don't get what point you think you're making.
* The first comment in this thread applauds the courage to turn down a $3bn acquisition, and suggests that the eventual outcome has vindicated that decision.
* The second comment suggests that this vindication is debatable based on Instagram’s valuation being higher than Snapchat’s
* I agree with the first comment and disagree with the second comment, so the point I am trying to make is that it the decision to turn down the acquisition was indeed vindicated.
Evan had this right - tracking as the primary value prop for advertising is a loser's game. Marketing is much more than just ads, and Snapchat has rebuffed going the easy route, honored by market participants, to uphold this principle. They will be an enduring company because of this. How 'big' of a company is up for debate, but honestly not worth the bits to transmit - they are one of the few, if only, doing good business in the social space.
I think they're making money, sure; but the promoted content on Snapchat is a total tabloid cesspool of click-bait garbage. I'd rather see ads for the Amazon product I bought last week, tbh.
>Evan had this right - tracking as the primary value prop for advertising is a loser's game.
The problem is that nowadays people mix Direct Marketing with Advertising.
Direct Marketing is where there's a need to track. Advertising is about attention, so if Snapchat has the attention of an audience, that alone is extremely valuable for advertising.
I disagree with the other reply. I think it was his brainchild, though more recently I've only heard horror stories/shitposts about Evan's management style.
They used to be a constant good idea machine. Not just stories, but so many innovations in messaging app ux. Still remember kids going effing mad and disrupting schools when they released video chats. Still some of the coolest most Intuitive ux ideas I’ve seen.
Hello HN - I'm an engineering manager at Snap focused on mobile app performance tools. If you're impressed with Snap's product and are an engineer obsessed with mobile performance, hit me up. We're actively hiring in this space!
I wish Snapchat had kept its momentum among my friend groups.
I much prefer social media where you explicitly choose who to send things to. It feels way more personal than the usual model where you post to your whole network on some public feed. I enjoyed taking a picture/video of something interesting, then quickly choosing which friends would find it amusing. It felt like I was saying, "I think that YOU will like this!" rather than "SOMEONE will like this". And if the recipient wanted to reply, that conversation was one-on-one and more personal.
There were other perks too: taking/sending snaps was pretty quick, their ephemeral nature lowered the bar of what you'd send (in a good way), the filters could were fun, and recipients could review snaps at their leisure.
Sadly only one or two of my friends are still active on it.
I don't mean this to be mean, but do people really believe these active user counts at face value?
I personally see these numbers and assume half are bots or controlled marketing accounts to boost viewers or spam comments. Just going off personal experience using these sort of apps.
Snapchat's userbase is more organic than most other social media platforms. I don't think I've ever seen a bot, and the "social circles" are much more private since it's less optimized towards meeting/finding new people. I'm sure there are still ways to profit from spamming or botting on snap but I can't really think of any. And not only is the social discovery potential pretty limited ( a part from celebrity accounts) but it's also only available on mobile apps (maybe the new snapcamera changed that but that's recent).
Maybe it's just me but in general, I use snap in a way that's pretty different to any other social media. I don't use it a lot anymore though, and it's still hard to explain that "difference" honestly
I don't really use Snapchat right now, but I constantly get spammed with friend invites from random "women" that I assume are fake accounts. Of course, Snapchat doesn't let you refuse obvious spam requests via notification (but they do let you accept them), so you have to open the app to clear the spam. A clear dark pattern and I would take these usage metrics with a huge grain of salt.
Certainly there are many, many bots. BUT, I have personally noticed a resurgence in snapchat popularity. It did indeed die, but it came back after (I think) people have gotten burnt out on the super public nature of Instagram.
Snapchat is more amenable to having a "persona". If you make an second account on Instagram, Instagram will literally start recommending it to the followers of your main account.
So Snapchat just allows for a use case that Instagram simply does not. Instagram is the new Facebook. They are not friendly to being anonymous or pseudonymous.
Snapchat has been more proactive on fighting bot than other competitors. You can easily copy the cookie from instagram.com and write a bot with puppeteer. You cannot just sniff the traffic from Snapchat app and hope to write a bot with that. It has been aggressive at binary obfuscation for request signing, and cracking down the 3rd party mods (such as the Snapchat Phantom mod).
I would guess that you could uncover this information in Snapchat's 10K filings.
In fact, I found the answer to your question on the 4th page of their annual filing to shareholders[1]:
> While these metrics are determined based on what we believe to be reasonable estimates of our user base for the applicable period of measurement, there are inherent challenges in measuring how our products are used across large populations globally. For example, there may be individuals who have unauthorized or multiple Snapchat accounts, even though we forbid that in our Terms of Service and implement measures to detect and suppress that behavior. We have not determined the number of such multiple accounts.
It seems to me that Snap is quite open about their active user counts.
> For example, there may be individuals who have unauthorized or multiple Snapchat accounts, even though we forbid that in our Terms of Service and implement measures to detect and suppress that behavior.
Weird. If a person is not a bot, you'd expect that when they are making an nth account they are attempting to apply another use case for the service in their life. More time in app.
I'd also expect there are fewer incentives for creating bots on snap versus other platforms. Its a messaging app, people only use it with people they know.
> If a person is not a bot, you'd expect that when they are making an nth account they are attempting to apply another use case for the service in their life
No. In my experience, it's because they lost access to the older account for whatever reason. Accounts are cheap and ephemeral and forgot password flows are horrible.
Probably the quality of the content in the app goes down dramatically if you allow multiple accounts. But I can see a use case where people need to manage their business profile and their personal one, or a celebrity needing to have an unknown account for close people only. I am sure there are many more.
That's fine, but the above commenter's question was related to the definition of an "active user", and Snapchat provides an answer to that question, even if it uses weasel words.
Huh? That chart shows Snapchat usage declining, whereas they have been claiming steady growth.
A lot of people on this thread are saying that people are doubting Snapchat’s numbers because they are old. And that’s definitely part of it.
But, it’s also all the other metrics that don’t add up. The extremely low revenue per user, for example. Even lower than Twitter, for example, which has very high global penetration (therefore most of their users are from places with much lower costs of living than the US and therefore don’t generate as much as revenue), and has users spread across lower value platforms like the web, as opposed to Snapchat’s app only interface.
On a personal level, I know someone whose business placed a bunch of ads in different social media (clothing primarily aimed at college aged women, but with a customer base that ranges from teens to late 20s) and had remarkably low engagement on Snapchat.
And all of this is despite Apple signal boosting Snapchat for several events in a row now.
It's an ephemeral photo-based private messaging platform popular amongst teenagers. I have zero doubt that it's carrying a ton of underage illicit content, but most of it is probably being made and consumed by teenagers themselves. Still a legal nightmare for Snapchat.
What I've noticed in the past two years... my daughters friends mother had it on her phone, her daughter showed my daughter the app when we were having lunch.
They were trying on 'masks' and various filters. The kids get a real kick out of it, and taking pictures of the adults.
My wife installed it on her phone, and likewise when we have met other families the kids have done the same. It's not used for any messaging element, just purely as a digital novelty for the kids to pass 15 - 20 minutes while we wait for food.
One random occasion led to about 6 families with 7-10 year old kids downloading and using the novelty aspects of the app. I expect the same ripple effect has happened with other children in each of their networks.
On Snapchat it’s extremely easy to take a quick photo and send to your friends. Open snap, take photo, edit photo (if you want) and select one or many friends or groups. Doing the same in any other messaging app is slower and more complicated. For me this is the killer feature.
You have to remember the target audience. When they first launched, their app was extremely unintuitive, to the point that it was very regular for someone to show their friends some feature they had just discovered. But that was part of what made it fun: Snap straddles the space between social media and toy in a pretty aggressive way.
And their primary audience of teenagers to young adults eats that up. Hell, it being baffling to "old people" was half the appeal.
I honestly don't care about their UX as no one I know uses it.
It's primary use in my "family life" is as a digital camera toy and for that purpose it's UX must not be that bad because my 8yo daughter is able to find the app, take photos with masks and filter she 'tries on' but not send them to anyone.
I find it interesting that snapchat still is used by young people and not really by older people.
I remember using it about 10 years ago in highschool, and then college, before I kind of went to nothing and then instagram to keep in touch with some people. I'm 26 now and I know a lot of people that still use it. But unlike facebook/instagram, I don't really know of any people much older than me that started using snapchat.
Big difference between this audience and how I (an old) experience the internet.
Up to Facebook (including IG):
- share things on the internet
After Facebook:
- do things _on_ the internet, in real or near-real time
- do things _for_ the internet
I’m not personally drawn to the post-Facebook experience but I see it as a rather natural progression. The novelty will probably wear off fast, but they keep making teenagers and there are probably few other places your old friends are bound to be.
Best way to think about Snap is it's a replacement for normal conversation. Normal conversations are ephemeral. Snap follows that. You take a picture, you show your friends, and that's it. You say something, and that's it. You don't store it somewhere for later. That's it.
And once you realize Snap allows you to carry on with that ephemeral experience even when you aren't near, you realize why it does so well.
There's a pretty wide gap between the "older Millennials" and the "younger Millennials" which I would assume is what they were trying to address by using "Gen Y" to refer to the younger ones. Although I've never heard that before.
Facebook used to be a place where you shared with friends, but a mix between putting average number of friends as a KPI and twitter envy the platform is now mostly content aimed at a beyond network audience.
Facebook did wise in making messenger it’s own app and opening up for an alternative with more intimate sharing.
Adopting stories was a great business move although it seems to be mostly instagram that has story adoption, which ironically is the platform that is most about broadcasting of all of metas platforms.
Arguably those ones disappeared together with desktop messaging: main use of messaging migrated from desktop to mobile, but they either never developed compelling mobile apps or developed them too late (Skype)
I'm 34 years old and stopped regularly using Snapchat when I was ¿27? Mostly I used it to split bills with my roommates, but the snapcash feature was removed so I downloaded Cash App. I know I haven't used Snapchat since 2017. I remember this because I was visiting Seattle and viewed geotagged stories to figure out what was going on around town. I deleted the app again when I got back home.
Their Cameos stickers are fun ...no other chat app I know offers that. They are jib jab like stickers you can send of yourself and your friend and yourself looking dumb lol
Snapchat was novel because of the ephemeral nature of the messages (and introducing stories). However in the late twenty teens they began focusing of face filters and introducing cringe ads & news networks which made it unusable for me.
Good to see they are still thriving though. Compared to Instagram they have maintained to be an app solely to communicate with friends vs. Instagram's philosophy of a feed of edited photos that can cause you to compare yourself to others.
Social media has low barriers to entry. Several new entrants have grown super-fast and have overtaken incumbents. Facebook was very clever to identify and buy up some of these fast-growing new entrants.
This holds lessons for the people who want free speech in social media. There are at least 10 social media apps/sites that say they practice what Elon Musk says should be the norm: Anything legal is allowable speech on social media.
And yet i do not see anyone pouring in the same levels of capital that Snapchat and some other newer entrants got. Why not? What is preventing first tier investors from backing these platforms? Why have several of them failed outright? What could turn that around?
Nobody's willing to pay for the access to use the product and if you want to be the free speech wing of the free speech blah blah them you're going to get popular backlash from people and most notably potential advertisers dollars. I feel like investors have lived through too many years of bad #metoo publicity to turn a blind eye and advertise on platforms with toxic (for many people) content. If you don't charge users and you can't get the high margin ad revenues, who's supporting your unicorn company that just may luck out and dislodge a small segment of the social media landscapes?
Are there any serious social networks who overtly advertise as anti-free speech? Making speech the hook when the site looks like a third-rate ripoff of Twitter isn't a winning strategy.
I had my first intern last summer - she's going to college this fall. She used Snapchat throughout the day to communicate with friends. I asked why-- it's non-public, informal, and low-friction in social terms (easier to ask for snap than a phone number). I got the sense that she was continuously lightly dropping in to various group conversations, while simultaneously talking to close friends, often by simply recording reactions on camera.
I've never used Snap so forgive any ignorance on my part.
This is pretty close to my own experience. I actively use Snapchat more than any other social platform because in many ways, it's not really a social "platform", in the same way that Instagram or Facebook or Tiktok are platforms. There are some people that use it that way, but largely, Snapchat is a convenient way of ephemeral, low-friction way to include a few people into your life. A picture here, a link to a cool article there, to a few friends at a time in a non-public way (very few people use it to cultivate an online persona in the way the above platforms encourage) that disappears within a day or so unless explicitly saved.
I use it a couple of times a day and have done for years. Primarily to keep up with close and loose friends from high school ect. Pictures from friends everyday life that are not necessarily meant to provoke a response still keep you in the loop and not drift apart.
It is more like more humans than bots are using Snapchat. Unlike the rest of the other platforms plagued by tons of bots doing nothing but spamming, scamming, etc its seems to have prevented that and optimised their product to be used by actual humans.
It's quite a difference, but isn't surprising to see and may also explain the rise in users, given the unlikelihood of millions of bots ruining and inflating the usage numbers.
But once again as I predicted, it is far from dying, [0] or even going to allow itself to getting acquired. [1]. In fact, they are the ones continuing to acquire more companies.
I am 25 and from my observations of social media-active people I connect with that were born and are living in the US, it's a split between instagram and snapchat. Many are active on snapchat stories and instagram.
My observation is that that IG is more popular with urban, liberal, artistic (people create and/or sell art), style-oriented, older audience. It feels more professional and public, and it's common to follow accounts like celebs, artists, businesses, or generally people you haven't met in person. Artistic and lifestyle people will use IG chat to communicate and connect. For example a yoga studio or music venue may post events there. It feels like it's taking the role of a more image-oriented facebook. The stories are very popular too.
Snapchat is (in my observation) more popular with midwestern/rural/suburban people, and the network is more friends of friends or maybe people you met at parties. It's much more casual and it's more likely you have met the people you connect with. Trendy urban people I have met have shunned it for a while and think it's childish, but some are coming back. Either way it's the primary way I communicate with certain contacts besides imessage/sms (mainly through the chat).
I'll post something to a story and someone will comment on it or vice versa.
Anecdotally snapchat was very popular in high school and early college and then waned, but became more popular again recently for some reason (I'm getting more and more views on my stories than before even though I'm not adding friends that frequently). Also when I talk to foreigners, they see it as a childish thing that was a fad in the 2010s, but people in the US (especially suburban types) are very active on it and have been for a while.
I'm bullish on snapchat and it's my largest "fun"/risk investment in a single company because of the stickiness it has with people my age and younger, specifically in a more midwestern rural/suburban demographic. Also the snapmap feature is phenomenal and will be the next thing other tech companies start imitating.
Lots of people, and I think the narrative that they died when instagram copied stories is sort of bogus. I know way more people who use and have used snapchat than who use Twitter. - Millenial
42M. I use it. Easy way to chat with people, send quick pics, nothing serious. The ephemeral nature makes it much less of a hassle to communicate with people because that's what communication normally is: ephemeral. My brother and sister-in-law use it, and numerous friends. Easy way to keep up to date on what they are doing without the hassle of FB or IG. Basically, a self-container group of friends that can easily share without hassle.
My whole family (parents in their 50s, kids in 20s), we use it for fun and family group chats. When it was new it became the defacto IM standard in the kids' age group and it just stuck. Save for straight SMS, which pre-paid users don't like, it's the least obnoxious of the IMish tools, I think.
Outside of the US I mostly use WhatsApp, I suspect if that (or Signal) was more widely used in the US Snapchat would be less popular.
I can honestly say I don't even know what Snapchat does. It's like chat? I'm a social media grump, but I can't avoid passively absorbing what they do. Snapchat has not entered my consciousness and/or its value can't be easily summarized.
Cam girls use it as an upsell, sending dirty pics and sexting. It's great for that sort of flirty business because of the lack of persistence. No receipts.
I'm 36 and using it a few times a week, mostly with my much younger siblings in their early 20's. Another family friend who has a daughter got her first smartphone recently, and snapchat was one of the first installs on that device. I used it as well pretty heavily when it first came out to keep in touch with family and friends.
Weirdly enough I have an interview with Snap in a few weeks as well. Despite the drop that tech stocks have seen everywhere the last year or so I think it's still a strong company to try and join.
Right, I wasn't implying that I should be in the demographic or anything of the sort. I don't use TikTok either, none of my friends do, but I've heard it mentioned a zillion times (in the media, IRL conversations, etc) in the past year. Same with other big social platforms: reddit, youtube, discord, facebook, instagram, telegram, and so on. Snapchat? nada, I've heard nothing. So it comes as a surprise to me to hear that it's alive and growing, which prompted my question.
How so? They define a Daily Active User "as a registered Snapchat user who opens the Snapchat application at least once during a defined 24-hour period" in their quarterly report:
Snapchat has been more aggressive at push notifications (such as @xxx friend posted a new story!) to move more MAUs / WAUs into DAUs category.
These strategies have been employed by other competitors as aggressive as well though. So it is probably still comparable. I would say Snapchat's metrics are more "authentic" a few years ago, but now it is more "comparable".
I haven't thought of Snapchat in many many months. Last time I logged in was only sync my bitmoji avatar. Their chat "experience" really sucks, this article is not even remotely plausible.
This is a laughably poor attempt at astroturfed buzz generation.
I really don't buy this. Almost all of my friends, who were prolific snap users in college, have converted away to instagram. Stories are so dead, and despite adding people most of my stories get the same ~15-20 views per 24 hours period.
That's all very anecdotal, and so is my next point: I get a new bot or porn spam account adding me once or twice a week, some of which have large karma counts indicating they've been around for a while.
So yes all of that is anecdotal but I suspect the bots I'm seeing are just the tip of the iceberg of what is actually making up the growing userbase of the app. Most of the young'ns appear to be on tiktok these days anyways.
I'm in the same situation (minus bot since I delete the app), but I interpret it as: Snapchat is for young people and I'm not longer young. To me it means they're not growing old with their audience, they keep reaching new teenagers every year, which makes them very valuable to advertisers.
Every dating app is filled with sex workers and bots that act like them, advertising their snapchat username in their profiles 24/7 next to "I'm not on here much use my snap". People check it out whether they really interact with the broader platform or not.
It doesn't really matter what you think your friends do socially, when people are hopping on when bored or on the toilet or before going to bed or when horny or lonely.
> Almost all of my friends, who were prolific snap users in college, have converted away to instagram.
Anecdotes are not evidence. Is this what it has come to just to make a 'point'?
> So yes all of that is anecdotal but I suspect the bots I'm seeing are just the tip of the iceberg of what is actually making up the growing userbase of the app. Most of the young'ns appear to be on tiktok these days anyways.
Some social networks have more bots than others. Especially more bots if the product is available as a web page unlike an app-based product which the barrier is higher. Given the security there, I doubt that there are millions of bots actively posing as users on Snapchat, verses the ones anyone encounters on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram.
The kids these days are also certainly using TikTok, but clearly that has been banned in some countries. Take India for example, which Snapchat seems to be thriving there. [0]
Regardless, I don't like or use either of these products since they are both essentially digital addictive drugs companies manipulating people on what is seen and unseen on their platforms. But I don't see how 'anecdotes' from anyone here hold true when the numbers from the earnings say otherwise. [1][2]
What's your age group? There are very few people under 25-30 who use Instagram. Everyone I know younger than that is religiously on Snapchat and TikTok.
As far back as 2014, I remember there being a huge ecosystem of "premium" snaps (sometimes known as "prem(ium) girls"), whereby you would pay the account owner a one time or recurring fee for access to a "premium" snapchat account where the owner posts nudes/etc, essentially OnlyFans-like content. Owner would typically accept payment through any number of ways (paypal/cashapp being most common), and "customer" would provide proof of payment by sending screenshot of receipt that the owner then confirms.
The premium account owner would also typically have a free/open account where they would post free content / teasers/etc, essentially marketing/advertising for their premium account. They would sometimes also market their account on Twitter and Reddit and especially Tinder (and one less popular app by the name of Whisper), much like OnlyFans content creators do today.
As far as I know, this preceded the popularity of OnlyFans and remains a popular use case for Snapchat. I don't use Snapchat much myself nowadays, but I used to be a customer of many of these premium snaps years ago. When I do log in once in a while, many of these accounts are still active, though some are also advertising their OnlyFans.
I think Snap officially bans this practice, but by nature these accounts are private and the owner adds users on a one by one basis, so I don't imagine they get reported a whole lot.
The fact that the content is ephemeral surely helps and is probably one of the main reasons the content creators choose Snap as their platform. Snap also tells you when users screenshot your content, which would often result in getting banned from the premium Snap. Unlike OnlyFans, which cannot get in the AppStore and is relegated to being web-only, Snapchat is mobile-only, making it harder for users to download the content, which is another appeal for these "premium" content creators.