Blog: Snap Inc

Social media companies have been happy to ride the tumultuous waves of digital advertising regardless of the market dominance of Google and Facebook. Arguments for tweaking the business model have always struggled to win-out against the benefits of scale, even during the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic.

Snapchat will announce a gaming platform for developers in the upcoming days, according to Cheddar . The hope is to boost engagement as well as revenue growth. Snapchat is still trying to pave its path towards profitability.

As outlined in our 2019 forecasting report, MIDiA predicts that Snap Inc. as we know it will be no more by the end of 2019. Its most notable asset Snapchat still has a sizeable audience among younger demographics but the company will be most likely acquired by a larger entity.

Snap Inc has launched an alternative to the ubiquitous ‘log-in with Facebook’ offer, which commands the paucity of visual real estate available on app screens. This follows Snap’s recent announcement of development tools designed to open up the app to anyone wishing to build features, much in the same way its tech rivals have done in the past.

Having promised a ‘whole new Snapchat’, it appears the app’s mooted re-design is not the revolution Evan Spiegel proposed during his company’s Q3 earnings call. The company’s founder stated that: “While blurring the lines between professional content creators and your friends has been an interesting Internet experiment, it has also produced some strange side-effects (like fake news) and made us feel like we have to perform for our friends rather than just express ourselves.

As tech’s big players continued to rollout their Q3 earnings reports, one of the most startling revelations was quietly embedded within Snap Inc’s stock ownership. The section read: In November 2017, Tencent Holdings Limited notified us that it, together with its affiliates, acquired 145,778,246 shares of our non-voting Class A common stock via open market purchases.

Former President and CEO of Netscape James L. Barksdale once said he knew of two ways to make money, ‘Bundling and Unbundling’. Whilst much of the focus has been on the unbundling factor of media, with consumers increasingly opting for more affordable SVOD services over cumbersome and expensive Pay-TV offerings, we could soon see another re-bundling factor occur.

After much anticipation, Snap Inc has released its Q2 earnings outlining the company’s progress in the past three months. Of course, much of the attention has focused on missing growth and revenue targets, as Snap continues to feel the pressure of competition with Facebook and other messaging services.

When the SnapBot finally popped up in Berlin, I eagerly trekked to the location to see whether the product would change my existing opinions about the company’s future. It did. I made my way to the SnapBot on a sunny Friday afternoon.

Following the release of its first earnings call since its IPO in March, Snapchat creator Snap Inc has seen its stock price drop 28% to its lowest price since going public. The development increasingly reflects investor uncertainty as to whether the company will be able to continue following a period of intense competition from Facebook and a consequent slowdown in growth.

At yesterday’s first ever Digital Content NewFronts, struggling social media platform Twitter made a bold play for relevance in the video-centric world of digital content. With much fanfare, Twitter unveiled a slew of 16 separate live streaming partnerships with premium media providers across Sports, News and Entertainment.

Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc. has followed up on its huge publicity around its recent IPO (Initial Public Offering) to land a significant content deal with Vice Media. Rapper chef Action Bronson (real name Arian Asllani) is set to host an eight episode dating series developed by Vice’s pay-TV channel Viceland entitled “Hungry Hearts With Action Bronson”.

Despite an audience both of huge scale and engagement (150m Daily Active Users), this is an uncertain time for Snap Inc. Though they have impressively manoeuvred away from their original incarnation as the alternative ephemeral image-messaging app towards building an impressive advertising model of discover channels and sponsored lenses, the company will be fully aware that in order to safeguard their lucrative prospective IPO (presently valuing the company at $25 Billion), they must preserve anarrative of continual growth if they areto acquiesce with Wall Street demands of tech stocks.