The Snapchat case: when a good business idea is not enough

[jrineakter]

The story of Snapchat could have been that of a social network that began in the teenage market and then reached the point of conquering us all, changing the way we communicate; even modifying our most basic habits. Its history could have been described as a technological and social revolution, but it is on its way to becoming a real disaster.

What has happened to make the network created by Evan Spiegel fall so far in the order of consumer preferences? First and foremost, Snapchat has been swallowed up – literally – by its competition. We are talking about an app that invented the functionality of uploading photos and videos that disappear 24 hours later, but Instagram came along with its Stories and took over its territory. A lot of territory.

Instagram launched the Stories service in August 2016 and six months later, in January 2017, this app managed to reach the same number of users on Stories as the total number of users accumulated by Snapchat since its launch in 2011. In addition, although Instagram was sweeping with its new function, Zuckerberg also launched greece number data himself into the outdated stories market by implementing a similar service on Facebook and, in this way, taking users away from the already battered Snapchat. Zuckerberg's idea goes back a long way. The CEO of Facebook tried to buy Snapchat in 2013 after having acquired Instagram, trying to add pieces to his monopolistic empire of knowledge and social interaction. The offer was very tempting for the creators of the app with popular dog and rainbow filters, but they decided to reject it and grow following their own market logic. Succeed or fall in their own way: and they are on the way to the latter.


According to a report published by Bloomberg on the figures of Snap –the app’s parent company– after its IPO, in the third quarter of 2017 the platform created by Spiegel earned US$207.9 million, US$27.9 million less than forecast; in addition, it recorded a drop of up to 60% in advertising revenue and losses of US$443 million.

Experts identify four obvious reasons for this decline: (1) Snapchat is too difficult to use, (2) it has failed to attract Android users, (3) it has had problems with the transition to an automated advertising program, (4) it has lost ground compared to other companies that have copied its best features.

Indeed, Snapchat's big problem is that Zuckerberg has not abandoned the idea of ​​outdated stories : in fact, he decided to put them at the heart of his projects – and against such a large competition it is difficult not to tremble. In addition, the app developed by three students from Stanford University has not been able to turn the project around to grow in other directions. Proof of this is the drift taken in 2018:

Kylie Jenner: “ Has anyone else stopped opening Snapchat or is it just me?”

Earlier this year, Snapchat decided to regain its lost market share by announcing an update that would change everything, and it did: it changed for the worse. Its big change was to split content into two halves, with content posted by friends on the left and content from media outlets and organizations on the right.

The redesign caused massive anger among users of the platform and provoked a reaction from media personality Kylie Jenner – from the Kardashian clan – who posted the following tweet: “Has anyone else stopped opening Snapchat or just me? This is so sad, but I still love you, Snap. My first love .” That message on an alternative social network was enough for the company, greatly weakened, to collapse on the stock market.