Snapchat company profile
Snap Inc. is a camera company, incorporated on May 24, 2012. The company’s flagship product, Snapchat, is a smartphone camera application which is used for communication through images and short videos. The company, through Snapchat, offers a range of creative tools including spectacles, memories, Friends Page, Discover and Snap Maps which enables users to personalize and customize their snaps. The company offers chat services including creating and watching stories, making voice and video calls, group chats as well as through a range of Bitmojis and Stickers. Moreover, Users can share their location, view nearby friends, create snaps and stories from their saved snaps.
Snap Inc. is as well engaged in advertising business through its advertising products; snap Ads and Sponsored Creative Tools. Snapchat users can create snaps using the sponsored creative tools, including sponsored Geofilters and Sponsored lenses. Snap advertisement are vertical full-screen videos in snap format. The company works with third parties to verify that an ad has reached its intended audience, including measuring the frequency and the reach, frequency, and the demographics of the viewers. As of December 31, 2017, the company had an average use of 187 million people every day to snap with family, friends, watch videos, stories and explore various contents.
Company history
Snapchat was created in 2011 by former Stanford University students Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown. Its first incarnation was during Spiegel presentation as part of his product design class. Initially, Snapchat was launched in July 2011 as an app called Picaboo but was later rebranded as Snapchat a few months later after the company received a cease letter from a photobook company which shared the same name. Between December 2012 and November 2014, the company was primarily focused on product build out, userbase acquisition and funding. During this period, Snapchat raises funds amounting to $143.5 million, and the userbase grows significantly with 400 million snaps being sent every day by November 2013.
Moreover, during this period, key features such as video sharing, ephemeral text messaging, and Snapchat stories are added to the product. From December 2014- August 2014, the company is focused on aggressive funding, video, and more product iterations. More than 2 billion dollars was raised, and with a considerable amount of funds, the company aggressively improved the products, including the introduction of new monetization strategies, stickers. From May 2015- November 2015, daily video views had grown from 2 billion to 6 billion and 10 billion by 2016.rebranding, and Initial Public Offering has been the company’s focus since September 2016-date. It is during this period that the company rebranded itself from Snapchat Inc. to Snap Inc and unveils spectacles.
CEO information
Even Spiegel is the co-founder and the CEO of Snap Inc. in 2017, and Spiegel received $638 million in total according to the company filing with the securities and exchange commission. However, the majority of these came from the stock award given to him for taking his company public in March 2017, which was nearly $636.6 million. Additionally, Spiegel made $1 million in various benefits and $98, 078 as the salary for the year. As the company CEO, Spiegel is actively involved in the company’s and is the ultimate decision maker. Spiegel understands the company’s operations and spearheads the introduction and improvement of products. Because Spiegel is a co-founder of the company, he is actively involved in both technical and managerial aspects of Snap Inc.
Spiegel has together with Snap Co-founder Bobby Murphy established A snap Foundation to further their philanthropic interests. Through the foundation, Spiegel donates funds for nonprofit arts, education, youth program. He and Murphy have pledged to donate 13M shares of class A common stock over the next 15 to 20 years, which translates to millions of dollars considering that the company is valued at 25 dollars.
Competitors
Facebook is one of the biggest competitors of Snapchat
Competition chart
Snapchat
Released -February 2004
Released -September 2011
1.13 Billion Daily Active Users
150 Million Active Users
Growth Rate 16%
Growth Rate-27.2%
8 Billion Daily Video Views
10 Billion Daily Video Views
Users Directly create Ads on Facebook
Ads are created BY developers
Click rate is lower
5X click through Rate
Features offered
Snapchat
Snap Ads
Filters
Lenses
Full-screen vertical video ads with attachments
Audio
Create & manage campaigns
300+ predefined audiences
Demographics
Audience match
Build custom audiences
Drag and drop customer lists
Tune performance
Geofilters
Ad manager
Snap publisher (video editing suite)
Multiple ad types
Objectives
Set budget
Schedule and run campaigns
Measure and optimize campaigns
Draw geofence
Campaign dashboard
Performance tracking
Campaign results
Creative library
Custom Audiences
Instant messaging
Video streaming
Newsfeed
Friends
Wall
Timeline
Reactions
Messages and Inbox
Notification
Groups
Events
Marketplace
Notes
Places
Platform
Facebook questions
Photos
Videos
Facebook Paper
Facebook mentions
Mood faces
Live to stream
Poke
Snapchat strength and weakness compared to Facebook
Regarding advertisement, Snapchat is well way ahead of Facebook. Snapchat integrates advertisement on its business model such that sponsored geofilters, filters, lenses, etc. are embedded in a manner that users will interact with advertisement without realizing they aided the company in making more money. In contrast, Facebook users can easily distinguish advertisement and regular posts and thus tend to ignore ads. However, Snapchat is at the moment focused on younger demographic groups between the age of 18-34 and has not penetrated across every age group as compared to Facebook. Moreover, for Snapchat to expand and be ubiquitous, they will have to overhaul its interface, educate people on app use and market to older generations.
Instagram is another major competitor of Snapchat, which is interestingly becoming increasingly similar to snap chat. However, the two apps are different regarding features and interface and content.
Instagram Vs. Snapchat features
Snapchat
Image editing
Location tagging
Private messaging
Commenting
@mentions
Push notifications
Group messaging
Hashtags
Filters
Video editing tools
Text & drawing tools
Live video streaming
Stories feature
Disappearing photos & videos
Search functionality
User tagging
User profiles
Public & private profiles
Snap Ads
Filters
Lenses
Full-screen vertical video ads with attachments
Audio
Create & manage campaigns
300+ predefined audiences
Demographics
Audience match
Build custom audiences
Drag and drop customer lists
Tune performance
Geofilters
Ad manager
Snap publisher (video editing suite)
Multiple ad types
Objectives
Set budget
Schedule and run campaigns
Measure and optimize campaigns
Draw geofence
Campaign dashboard
Performance tracking
Campaign results
Creative library
Custom Audiences
Instant messaging
Video streaming
Snapchat strength and weakness as compared to Snapchat
Comparing snapshot to Instagram, snap Inc. has more filters, which makes it more interesting. From bunny faces, pug faces, flower crowns, Snapchat has a collection of most creative and fun filters. Nonetheless, the inability to share links or tag people in Snapchat is its great weakness when compared to Instagram. The limited search functionality of Snapchat limits users from searching and the following someone as it is on Instagram.
Performance analysis
Six months
The Snapchat stock price has gone up for the last six months, nearly doubling its stock price from $5.79 to 13. 87 in June 2019. The steady and consistent rise in Snapchat stock price can be attributed to the anticipation of a new Android app rollout, more monetization opportunities, and promising ROI for Advertisers.
One year
In June 2018, the Snapchat stock price had gone up to $14.05, but the prices fell in the subsequent months reaching the lowest in December where the stock price stood at $4.99. in the following months to date, the stock market price has consistently risen to $13.87 as of 6/8/2019. The almost 60% decline in Snapchat stock was mainly due to user defections after snap chat redesigned the Snapchat app which was exacerbated by celebrities such as Kyler Kardashian tweeting on their disappointment with the updated Snapchat app. Moreover, increased competition from Facebook and Instagram contributed to the decline in the Snapchat stock value. The rise in the stock market price as from December 2018 to date can be attributed to the factors indicated in the six months stock analysis performance.
Five years
Snapchat was first made public in 2nd March 2017, and thus the company’s stock only dates two years back. The stock prices were on all-time high standing at $27.09 on the day the company was made public. However, since then, the company has faced a series of rising and fall in stock prices. However, the initial stock price is the highest to date owing to aggressive competition from other social media apps, bad publicity, and unwelcomed app redesign and updates.