Is Snapchat worth more than Four Billion Dollars?
Snapchat, the social network that lets its users send messages to each other that disappear in a matter of seconds, has turned down two offers in recent time reportedly. A three billion Dollar offer from Facebook, and a four billion Dollar offer from Google.
The big question that came to my mind immediately after I read about this was why did the company turn down the offers, and what makes the other companies think Snapchat is worth that much money?
If you look at Snapchat from a third-party perspective, you see a social network with a considerable number of users. That's the companies strongest asset and what makes it attractive to larger companies. Other than that, it has little to offer.
The application and technology itself can be replicated for a fraction of the price that companies seem willed to pay for Snapchat, and while companies may be inclined to add the engineering staff to their own, it does not really justify this amount of cash.
What weights more in my eyes is that the service is not generating revenue right now, and that it is not clear how it will ever do so. Sure, it could display ads to users of its service, or launch a premium version that adds other features to it that users may be interested in. And those possibilities play a big part in its evaluation certainly.
But that has not been launched yet. So, we are back to square one. So how many users does Snapchat have? The company revealed in a blog post in October that 350 million Snaps are sent every day by users of the service. Information about the user base have not been published publicly though.
So why have the offers been turned down by Snapchat? The most likely explanation is that the company and its investors believe that they can get more for it. The daily Snaps increased this year along from about 60 million in February to 350 million in October showing a strong growth.
If the user base and its engagement is still showing strong growth signs, a decision could have been made to keep the company independently run for now as its evaluation will increase if that is the case.
The question that we have not looked at yet is if the company is worth the three or four billion Dollars that Facebook or Google would have paid for it, or if it is worth more as its founders and investors believe it is.
You could say that it is, considering that other companies would have paid that much for it. From a bystander's perspective, it seems like an awful lot of money for a company that generates no revenue at the current time. From a strategic point of view, it could make sense nevertheless, provided that users do not leave ship once the service is monetized.
What's your take on this? Is this a new bubble that is going to burst any time soon? Or are those evaluations making sense?
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.