Is Snapchat’s reign beginning to die?

The billion-dollar image messaging app “Snapchat” rose to fame in early 2012 and became one of the most successful social media platforms in the shortest amount of time ever, offering its users a picture based instant messaging service.

However fast forward to the present and the once-booming social media platform is beginning to suffer, the latest reports show a loss of £337 million in this last quarter and much lower user growth statistics with an increase of just 4.3 million new unique users. This has caused shares to plummet to $12 (well below the $17 price eight months ago when Snapchat went public)

What is happening to Snapchat? Why is it crumbling?

Set the clock back to 2012 and Snapchat was the king of social media that everyone wanted a piece of, with Facebook trying to buy it out on multiple occasions. Even in 2016 (4 years after its initial launch), Snapchat was still equalling twitters monthly user rate of around 300 million, so what has happened?

The issue with creating a “golden idea” like Snapchat’s picture based messaging service is the likelihood of others copying and innovating your idea. This can be seen with Snapchat and the rise of its competitors such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter and their interpretation of Snapchat’s picture based instant messaging service. These variations have lowered Snapchat’s appeal and taken away it’s major selling point for users to download and use it. Here are some examples below:

Facebook:

In March 2017 Facebook released their own version of Snapchat with the introduction of “direct” which allows users to send images to friends which disappear after a selected amount of time as well as a “Story” feature allowing users to put up snaps in chronological order throughout their day (exactly the same as Snapchat).

Instagram:

Instagram (owned by Facebook) have also come out with their own picture sharing functionality remarkably similar to Snapchat named “Instagram stories“. The introduction of this new feature has been extremely successful and has already overtaken Snapchat on the number of daily users as well as stunting Snapchat’s growth by 82% in the past year.

Whats next for Snapchat?

Snapchat has been around for almost 5 years now and has ultimately changed the social media space. The introduction of picture based instant messaging and stories have changed social media for the better and managed to beat and dominate the giant that is “Facebook” for multiple years ( something only a select few can claim).

However do not completely deem Snapchat as a “dying” platform. The app still has over 100 million monthly users and unlike the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Whats App the team at Snapchat are incredibly good at innovating and have developed and implemented multiple app upgrades in the previous few years, such as Bitmoji’s, location-based maps, shared stories and other improved functionality, something we have not seen from the likes of Facebook.

Fun Facts about Snapchat

• It would take you 10 years to view all the photos shared on Snapchat in the last hour.
• Over 1 Billion snaps are sent out every day across the globe.
• There are 400 million Snapchat stories posted every day.
• Snapchat was originally named “Picaboo” but was rebranded in 2012 for the apps android launch.