William Liaw’s blog post about Snapchat’s turndown to a $3 billion offer from Facebook got me wondering about the root of Snapchat’s decision, what plans they have to further expand their app, and how they hope to enlarge their customer base.
Snapchat is easily becoming one of Facebook’s greatest competitors because it has an extremely important point of difference that no other social network has. Everything shared self-destructs within 10 seconds so nothing’s left behind. Within two years, more than 350 million images were being shared through Snapchat every day. Surprisingly, Snapchat has not established any means of revenue streams yet. Founders of Snapchat have only begun now to consider charging users for added services and in-app transactions in the future. Whatever their plans are, Snapchat could be taking a huge risk. Social networks, app markets, and the like are rapidly changing and the market for Snapchat could be easily taken away. Not to mention, the idea behind the app could be easily replicated by competitors and on top of that, Snapchat has faced plenty controversies, including its encouraging means for young people to sext and its inability to prevent hackers, makes the foundation of the company’s services rather unstable.