Last week, Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., filed paperwork for an IPO, with an expected valuation of $25 billion or more. In 2014, Snapchat introduced advertising into the platform. In 2015, it generated $60 million in revenue from that advertising, and, in 2016, it expects to exceed its target of $350 million in revenue. Snapchat is targeting $1 billion in revenue in 2017.
Snapchat reports 150 million users daily and 235 million users monthly, including 41% of 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S., according to Nielsen. Snapchat shows strong signs of being a healthy business. With continued user and revenue growth, Snapchat will be a hot company for several years to come – even with the new scrutiny of the public markets.
But, long-term, Snapchat could face a similar issue as Twitter: being a company that offers only a niche audience advertisers. Unlike Google and Facebook that offer a large and broad range of audiences to advertisers, Snapchat caters mainly to younger Millennials and Generation Z audiences. Facebook touts ~1.71 billion monthly users – approximately 25% of the world’s population. By comparison, Twitter has ~313 million monthly users. Twitter has struggled in recent years to win over investors – primarily because it is compared to Facebook. Twitter has only ~18% of the monthly users that Facebook has. And, Twitter has been criticized for its slowing user and revenue growth while being unprofitable. Twitter’s stock price has dropped from $69 per share at its peak in January 2014 to $18.79 today.
While we can expect that Snapchat will continue to grow its user base at a nice rate for the foreseeable future, as it captures more of share the 34-year-old and under audience, the real test will come when Snapchat can no longer rely on that audience for user growth. It will need to stay relevant to the new young audiences entering their teens and twenties, while expanding its relevancy to older audiences. And, it will need to do this while achieving profitability. Otherwise, in a few years, we could be seeing Snapchat face similar issues that Twitter has faced in recent years.
