Presently, yes. However, it does not have the same long-term potential as Twitch. Snapchat is ephemeral, a trend.

I think Snapchat might have more staying power than you're giving credit for.

Here's the value of Snapchat: Social interaction without the paper trail.

For years people have been talking about the experience of today's youth who will, by the time they are 20, have thousands of old posts and tweets and blogs and instagrams. How many people have lamented the way these might come back to haunt you 10, 15 years later? It's a warning I gave my (much younger) sister when she got on Facebook at age 13.

Snapchat solves that. Snaps can be saved, sure, but you won't leave the paper trail you do on Facebook.

I personally doubt Snapchat will be a future blue chip on its own. But if they hit a hundred million users... well, we're living in a WhatsApp world. Based on the latest numbers I've seen, I'd guess they're about half way there. If growth is continuing in 2014 the way it was in 2013, they could see 100+ MM in a year.

The only issue is that I can't see how "no paper trail" allows for the current routes of monetisation to work... that said, if they can come up with something different then they've got something very exciting on their hands.

Glad to see you're the leading authority on this matter. Tell me, from whence did you judge that Snapchat is "ephemeral"?

How did you manage to outplay the dozens of very smart, very experienced, and very successful VCs and investors that have spent dozens of man-hours thinking about whether they should or should not dump millions of dollars into Snapchat? You are aware, that, as of now, Snapchat has raised more than $100M total in funding, from initial seed to it's Series C, and that some of the biggest players in SV have offered to buy it for upwards of $4B? I'm quite shocked to see that your little quip regarding it's long-term potential has somehow out-qualified all of this money and time and thought that went into it's current state. Especially since investors value long term potential over everything else : the whole deal with economics is finding value before anyone else does, otherwise you're just a bandwagoner. Early bird gets the worm, so the most successful early birds are those that look the furthest for the worms with the highest long-term potential.

They berated Google for making a bad decision when they acquired YouTube and they called Facebook a trend that was just "MySpace for college kids". Maybe you're not in the right demographic for using Snapchat, so that's why you don't see it's long-term potential?

Large amounts of funding have historically shown little correlation with success.

Really? Can you show me any statistical data for that? Or just anecdotal stuff? Because trust me, there's probably 10x as much anecdotal evidence for companies with large amounts of funding that HAVE had success. Just looking around me at the company-produced products I'm currently using : Apple, Google, Microsoft, IKEA, Black & Decker, Walmart...

You're probably dealing with a lot of confirmation bias.

If not, you're probably going to pull statistical data regarding the dot com bust. Failed companies during the dot com bust were a lot different than Snapchat. They had no users and were funded by clueless empty suits who thought that business success was the combination of a half-assed idea you thought up during dinner and waaay too many code monkeys working on your terrible idea with a forced deadline.

That's not what Snapchat is. Large amounts of funding from very respected investors with high success rates of investment in companies with a lot of users ... show high correlation with success.

Snapchat has a shit ton of users, runs pretty lean cost-wise (low amt of employees, small offices, efficient database/server management, etc.) as any tech company worth a shit these days will run (compared to dot coom bust, that is), continuously rolls out updates and features, and has a lot of funding. All of these very important factors when discussing a company's success.

For every example of a company that has failed with 1. had a shit ton of users, 2. didn't blow it's money on stupid shit like Aeron chairs and way too many employees (as companies during the dot com bust did), 3. has rapid development, and 4. has a lot of funding, there are 1000 companies that has succeeded like that. That's because those things are pretty good determinants of success.

User data is the current currency in Silicon Valley.

When you can't charge users for GET requests and everyone in the nation is too reluctant to spend a penny on iOS apps, the only real source of income for companies that focus on web/mobile markets is advertisement. So you work on optimizing ROI for advertisement. One way of doing such is optimizing user data analysis. Know your users' demands better -- their ___location, their demographic, their interests -- advertise stuff they're more likely to click on, get paid more by ad agencies. In order to analyze user data, you need, 1. "analyze" : accurate and thorough aggregation algorithms (I'm speculating that this is why Google bought Deep Mind and Zuckerberg/Thiel invested in Vicarious), and 2. "user data" : shit tons of raw data regarding your users.

And companies with a lot of users have a lot of user data. Even if Snapchat advertises ephemerality, they're really storing all of those pics on their database after they're deleted client-side (why else would servers even exist, there's no reason, technically, something like Snapchat couldn't work in pure P2P if you're really getting rid of the user data). Not to mention the metadata regarding your phone number and your friends list. While the first bit of advertisement optimization -- "analyze" -- may seem like it's not good enough at analyzing pictures and social graphs (your friends and your friends' friends and your friends' friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends that happen to be in your friends and also your friends' friends, etc.) just yet, 1. this is why AI is becoming so popular, and 2. this is the risk the VC is taking by investing in Snapchat. Obviously every sound investment takes some risk, or else it'd be so objectively obvious that everyone would make the investment and you wouldn't get a high ROI.

The risk here is saying "user data in the form of pictures and social graphs, and whatever something like Snapchat can reasonably evolve into if we keep it surviving" is valuable.

What you're saying when you say "large amounts of funding have historically shown little correlation with success", you're talking about clueless, unexperienced investors saying that "my vague business idea when paired with hundreds of programmers and really expensive Aeron chairs is valuable".

Not only is the former much more believable, given the high success of companies that, 1. initially seemed like useless toys to short-sighted people on the Internet, but had a SHIT TON of users and a very fast development cycle and 2. gone from no-revenue to some-revenue YEARS after initial success, this is also a prediction being made by motherfucking Andressen-Horowitz.

So, no, I'd say cases like Snapchat have HIGH correlation with success. Sorry you don't have anyone to sext.

I don't think it not having long term potential is a fact. Let's wait and see what they are planning before making those claims.

It also has no revenue.