Company / division: Snap
‘Planet Earth II’ Snapchat Show Will Promote BBC TV Series – Variety (Feb 6, 2017)
More evidence that Snapchat is TV for millennials? (As Ben Thompson, Kerry Flynn at Mashable, and today Christopher Mims at the WSJ this morning have each suggested.) Perhaps more interestingly, though Snapchat has been described as trying to win over TV advertising dollars, this is actually a promotion of sorts for a traditional TV show itself, with shorter-form, vertically-oriented videos on Snapchat as a sort of taster. There will actually be ads within this video as well, so this isn’t advertising per se, though its goal is clearly to drive viewership on BBC America here in the US. As with its Google relationship, Snap’s relationship with TV is likely to be complicated, as it both seeks to steal ad dollars from TV while also taking ad dollars (and content) from the TV industry. At any rate, if you haven’t seen Planet Earth II yet, I highly recommend tuning in when it airs – it’s fantastic.
via Variety
Snap Future Shaped by Complex Ties to Google as Supplier, Rival – Bloomberg (Feb 3, 2017)
This is interesting additional detail around the Snap IPO filing I covered yesterday (and which I wrote about in depth at Beyond Devices today). Snap recently signed a 5-year deal with Google to use its cloud services to the tune of at least $400m per year, and the companies have worked together on some stuff in the past two, including some projects that never made it to production. But Google was also listed among the handful of competitors Snap specifically cited in its S-1, so this relationship is, as Facebook might say, complicated. That’s particularly the case around search, which is one of the areas where Snap was partnering with Google but eventually pulled out and decided to build its own platform instead.
via Bloomberg
Snap Publicly Files for an IPO and Reveals Financial and User Data (Feb 2, 2017)
The long-awaited Snap S-1 was released this afternoon just as Amazon and GoPro were reporting earnings, so it’s been busy. I tweeted some of the most interesting tidbits I saw at first glance earlier, but will do a deep dive for a blog post at some point in the next 24 hours too. Some highlights: the company is growing very rapidly in revenue terms, as it ramps ARPU fast, but still makes 88% of its revenue from North America, even though a majority of users are overseas. User growth has been decent, ending 2016 with 160 million daily active user (its only user base measure), but has slowed in recent months, which Snap blames on both a poor Android update and competitive moves (such as Instagram Stories, though it’s not mentioned by name). It loses money in massive amounts – there’s no clear path to profitability here any time soon, even with rapid growth, as cost of revenues alone outweigh revenues. Engagement is mentioned 103 times in the filing, as was widely anticipated, but the only measure mentioned beyond DAUs is time spent, and it’s not provided on a consistent basis. That’s a worrying sign at a time when Snap needs to be demonstrating that its users are not just using the app daily but spending more time in it. Other tidbits: Apple is mentioned in a list of competitors, and Google is Snap’s cloud provider, with a massive commitment to future spending with the company. This blog post goes into a lot more depth on the filing.
via Snap’s S-1 filing (more coverage on Techmeme)
Warning Signs Abound As Snap Barrels Toward IPO – BuzzFeed (Feb 1, 2017)
Yet more signs that Snapchat is suffering both as a result of Instagram’s recent feature additions and perhaps because of broader cloning of its feature set by local alternatives in Asia. We’ll hear from the horse’s mouth shortly how Snap sees these changes, and it’ll have to work hard to refute these negative signals about engagement and growth in its app when it releases its public IPO filing shortly. The narrative around Snap is quickly turning negative, and it’ll have to intervene quickly to reset it (if it’s able to do so).
via BuzzFeed
Snap Is Working on Smarter Lenses (AR) — The Information (Feb 1, 2017)
AR has seemed an obvious area for Snap to invest in, given its focus on cameras and camera-centric experiences, and its existing Lenses product. So it’s not that surprising to hear that the company is working on AR-style lenses for something other than mere selfies, using the rear-facing camera. It sounds fairly basic for now, and very much in keeping with the idea of superimposing objects onto the real world for taking and sharing pictures. But of course once the technology is there it could theoretically be repurposed for other things too, including a potential future version of Spectacles with AR capability which would overlay virtual content onto the real world seen through its glasses. Lots of potential here, and as ever it’s still very early days in AR (and in the broader AR/VR battle).
via The Information
Instagram Stories is stealing Snapchat’s users – TechCrunch (Jan 30, 2017)
This would be very bad news if it turns out to be true – celebrities and those who manage celebrity and other accounts on Snapchat claim they’re seeing a significant reduction in views of their Stories on Snapchat as a result of both Instagram’s launch of its own Stories feature and Snapchat’s move to kill the Auto-Advance feature for Stories in its own app. This kind of thing is always worth taking with a pinch of salt – the ranges discussed here are very broad, and some of the data might be outliers – but the trend seems to be consistently downward, and is backed up by some app download data as well. The positive spin from Snap here would be that it’s actually focusing engagement more by only showing users the Stories they actually choose to see, but I’m not sure investors will buy that. Again, any day now we should have some real data from Snap to go on to evaluate engagement and usage, but this is another specific concern they’ll need to address in the S-1 filing. In the meantime, more evidence that Facebook and Instagram’s strategy here is paying off, and that when Facebook broadly launches its own Stories feature the impact could be even more severe.
via TechCrunch
Snapchat’s Streaks Drive Usage But Perhaps Not Ad Viewing – Bloomberg (Jan 30, 2017)
I changed the headline here both to capture the main point of the article and to avoid a different connotation with the word “streaker”, which appears in the original. Teenagers in particular, but also some young adult users, work hard to keep “streaks” of activity between themselves and friends on Snapchat alive as long as possible, much as Apple Watch users might try to keep a stand or move streak alive. But the Snapchat behavior verges on obsessive or addictive, and much of the actual sharing between friends ends up becoming meaningless as user post for the sake of posting. Snapchat deliberately encourages this kind of behavior, and it drives usage of the app, but it doesn’t necessarily drive meaningful engagement, which is technically something different. Those users aren’t necessary spending emotionally significant time in the app, and they’re not necessarily looking at the parts of the app where they’re likeliest to see ads. When Snap makes its IPO filing public, digging for signs of this disparity between usage time and real engagement with content and ads is going to be key. It’s really the Discover and other content tabs rather than the one-to-one sharing features that will drive ad viewing and revenue, and Snap needs to be transparent about where users are actually spending time.
via Bloomberg
Digital media fell in love with Snapchat, and now Snapchat loves TV – Mashable (Jan 28, 2017)
This is a great bit of reporting on how Snapchat’s Discover feature has evolved since it first launched, and how Snap’s relationship with publishers and content providers has evolved with it. Discover continues to be the most obvious place for Snap to deliver growth in ad revenue, and having quality content is a big part of achieving that goal. Snap is also putting more emphasis on competing with TV for millennial viewers, an audience which is both overrepresented on Snapchat and underrepresented in traditional TV viewership. There are lots of good comments in this piece from publishers who have worked with Snap and seen good results, some of them driving decent profits from their channels and others merely experimenting with a new format. Well worth reading the whole thing.
via Mashable
Snap plans to publicly file for its much-anticipated IPO late next week – Recode (Jan 27, 2017)
I’m so looking forward to this filing being made public – it’s always a lot of fun to suddenly be able to dive deep into a formerly private companies finances and metrics. I’m very curious as to what they show and I’ll certainly write an in-depth analysis when I’m done investigating. The things I’m most interested in are revenue run rate and profitability. Snap has been trying to get commitments from media buyers to spend more in 2017, but I’m not sure there will be any evidence of that in the filing, which will typically be backward- rather than forward-looking. I’m assuming Snap isn’t profitable, but just how profitable and what the trajectory looks like there are big questions – Twitter famously still isn’t profitable several years after its IPO, while Facebook is one of the most profitable tech companies out there, so this is another area where Snap will want to demonstrate it’s more like the latter than the former.
via Recode
Snapchat NYC Spectacles store is mostly empty – CNBC (Jan 26, 2017)
Snap’s foray into hardware coincided with its new company name, and the marketing strategy for the Spectacles was genius – very short supply combined with a sales model that made availability even narrow by focusing it on single vending machines that moved around, combined with a single permanent store in New York City. However, it’s becoming apparent now (if it wasn’t obvious from the start) that Spectacles aren’t going to be massive sellers. Yes, hundreds of people lined up early on to buy them, but the crowds have now disappeared. I’m somewhat surprised Snap hasn’t put Spectacles up for sale anywhere else yet – it’s still basically impossible to buy a brand new pair at list price unless you live in or visit NYC or happen to be in one of the other places where the moving machines have turned up. That suggests, though, that this move into hardware was more experimental than strategic, and raises the question of whether we’ll see more of this from Snap in future. There’s certainly potential for some interesting new functionality around AR in future versions, but there are few indications at this point that Snap has any big plans.
via CNBC
Facebook testing Snapchat clone called Facebook Stories – Business Insider (Jan 25, 2017)
Instagram Stories seem to have worked out really well for Instagram, increasing engagement and gaining rapid adoption, while Snapchat’s growth seems to have leveled off a little lately. It now appears Facebook plans to bring stories into the core Facebook experience too, which makes lots of sense: for all Instagram’s popularity, Facebook’s user base is several times as large, and so Facebook can easily extend the feature to many more people in this way. The attraction of the Stories format (and Snapchat’s ephemeral approach in general) has always been that users didn’t have to work so hard to post the perfect picture to live forever on the site. Snapchat users gravitate towards the throwaway nature of sharing on the platform, and Instagram’s Stories feature has been a nice antidote to the false perfection that’s characterized a lot of sharing among teens in particular there. Facebook should benefit in the same way from this feature, especially since organic sharing is said to have fallen recently. Live Video was supposed to be part of the solution here, per Mark Zuckerberg, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
via Business Insider
Snapchat Is in Talks for Big Ad Deals Ahead of IPO – WSJ (Jan 25, 2017)
Another day, another story about Snap trying to grow its ad revenue, this time focusing on getting up front commitments from major ad agencies’ ad buying arms. Given how nascent Snap’s ad business is, convincing potential investors that it has a predictable run rate for ad spend is critical to a successful IPO, so getting some promises from major buyers to increase spending in 2017 would be a useful first step. But of course that increased spend will only come if the ROI is there, which has been the other piece of this puzzle for Snap over recent months, trying to demonstrate that advertising on Snapchat can be more than just speculative.
via WSJ
DCN report shows publisher revenue from Google, Facebook, Snapchat – Business Insider (Jan 24, 2017)
This article (and the report it’s based on) frustratingly focuses on average numbers across a range of very different publishers, rather than providing something more detailed, which limits the usefulness of the data, but there’s some interesting stuff in here regardless. For one, this reinforces the sense that publishers are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to supporting the major new content platforms – on the one hand, they feel they can’t afford to be absent, and on the other systems like Facebook Instant Articles and Google’s AMP don’t seem to allow them to monetize as they do on their own sites. One surprising finding is how strongly Snapchat shows here relative to its overall share of ad revenue. The picture is muddied by the fact that the report covers both video and news content, and so YouTube makes a very strong showing overall too. The key takeaway for me is that these companies continue to tread a difficult and dangerous path as they work with these platforms, ceding a lot of control to them and potentially seeing less revenue as a result.
Update: the actual report is now available here in full.
via Business Insider
Inside Instagram’s reinvention – Recode (Jan 23, 2017)
This is a great little profile of Instagram, with lots of little tidbits of information. There are several overarching themes: the mimicking of Snapchat features is definitely one of them, but the broader context is that Instagram is generally moving really fast to ship new features, which is particularly striking given that Kevin Weil, who runs product, came from Twitter, a company that often seems paralyzed by indecision when it comes to tweaking functions. The whole piece reinforces the sense that Instagram is the vehicle through which Facebook is both iterating more quickly and trying to compete more directly with Snapchat, while the evolution within the core Facebook product is slower and more deliberate.
via Inside Instagram’s reinvention – Recode
Snapchat Discover Takes a Hard Line on Misleading and Explicit Images – The New York Times (Jan 23, 2017)
There’s a certain irony in the fact that Snapchat is now trying to remove some of the lewder images from its Discover tab, when its early reputation (somewhat undeservedly) was that of an app that existed specifically so that users could send each other such images of themselves. But this is the sort of thing we see as apps and services that have been allowed to run relatively unfettered begin to ramp up efforts to court advertisers in preparation for an IPO, which is exactly what Snap is doing. Cleaning up the Discover tab should provide some more comfort to advertisers about the context in which their ads will be seen, though there’s nothing in these guidelines about racy images that are relevant to the Stories behind them, which I’d say many of the images I see in the Discover tab arguably are. The other side of this effort could be increased user controls around the content they see on the Discover tab, since some users would prefer not to see those images or the Stories behind them at all – balancing the needs of publishers, advertisers, and users is always the hardest balancing act for any ad-backed business.
via Snapchat Discover Takes a Hard Line on Misleading and Explicit Images – The New York Times
Snapchat Is Justifying Its $20 Billion Valuation by Emphasizing User Engagement – Bloomberg (Jan 20, 2017)
This is in some ways part of the same story we heard a while back about Snap positioning itself as another Facebook rather than another Twitter. Facebook is all about engagement, providing numbers on not just monthly but daily active users, and talking up time spent as well. Though Twitter briefly dabbled with metrics like timeline views as an indicator of engagement, it quickly abandoned that metric and has steadfastly refused to provide daily active user numbers, focusing instead on MAUs and directional rather than absolute measures of engagement. Snap clearly wants to avoid those associations with Twitter and so has provided to investors data on engagement across several dimensions, which will hopefully be made available in its S-1 filing when that’s made public too. A key part of the Snapchat value proposition is that its users spend a lot of time on the service, so proving that to investors will be critical.
via Snapchat Is Justifying Its $20 Billion Valuation by Emphasizing User Engagement – Bloomberg
Your real-world purchases will soon determine what ads you see on Snapchat – Mashable (Jan 19, 2017)
Here’s further evidence that Snap is evolving Snapchat’s advertising targeting capabilities, something it badly needs to do to ramp up ad spending ahead of a potential IPO. But that also means going back on some of the commitments Evan Spiegel has made in the past to avoid “creepy” targeting. The reality is that Snapchat has captured a nice little share of ad spending purely on the basis of having a great target market for a certain generation at a general level, but if it wants to capture more targeted advertising, it needs to provide the tools that Facebook, Google, and others already provide. That means buying in data from Oracle (as in this deal, and further to a previous deal with Oracle for measuring ROI) or other data collection houses (as Facebook already does) in order both to target advertising and to capture information about subsequent purchases to prove an ROI. Though Snapchat’s target market is generally more open to ad-based business models and the attendant privacy implications, there’s a point at which even millennials will balk, and Snap has to be careful not to cross that line.
via Your real-world purchases will soon determine what ads you see on Snapchat – Mashable
Ad spend on Snapchat by clients hit $90 million in 2016: WPP CEO – CNBC (Jan 18, 2017)
One of the big challenges for Snap ahead of its IPO is ramping up advertiser spending from experimental to more serious levels, and WPP is one of the biggest funnels through which those ad dollars flow. $90 million is three times what WPP expected its clients to spend on Snapchat at the beginning of the year, but of course it’s a tiny fraction of what those clients spend on Facebook and Google. Getting advertisers to spend more means providing more of the tools and analytics other large online ad platforms provide, and Snap has been somewhat resistant to that approach, although it appears to recognize the need to evolve on this point going forward.
via Ad spend on Snapchat by clients hit $90 million in 2016: WPP CEO – CNBC
Can Snapchat’s Culture of Secrecy Survive an IPO? – Bloomberg (Jan 17, 2017)
It’s an interesting change to see a story like this written about a company other than Apple, which is usually the focus of articles about obsessive secrecy. Snap is of course a private company at this point, and so has had to share very little about its business with very few people, but that will all change with its IPO, so it’s going to have to get better at divulging at least some things to its investors. On the other hand, I always feel like the media likes stories about how secrecy makes things harder for companies – perhaps because it makes things harder for reporters – and yet there’s very little evidence to back up the claim. Some of the best companies are the best at keeping secrets about their products, precisely because they want to control the narrative when the products are ready for release, rather than have others write the narrative for them based on leaks and rumors.
via Can Snapchat’s Culture of Secrecy Survive an IPO? – Bloomberg
This is not a drill: Snapchat is about to get a major redesign – Mashable (Jan 12, 2017)
It’s always seemed almost a point of pride with Snapchat that its user interface is unintuitive and hard to navigate, so it’s a bit surprising to see it engage in such a significant redesign of its app. But this may well make the app less intimidating to new users who’ve been put off by the previous arcane user interface, which may be an indication that Snap wants to broaden the appeal of its app beyond its current target market.
via This is not a drill: Snapchat is about to get a major redesign – Mashable