No, they have something much bigger and better up their sleeves. Leaving a few million on the table now in the interest of potential billions later is a very good trade.
Personally, I think the world is ready for a footprint-free social app - not just photos, but threaded conversation and what not. Like Facebook, only without anything for employers to troll and exes to stalk. I think they could literally beat Facebook. That's worth a lot of waiting and risk.
Facebook's per-user revenue for US users was $4.19 as of last October (with far smaller amounts for non-US users). And that's with years of experience, rich targeting based on multi-year social data mining, and the ability to embed several ad impressions per pageview. Is Snapchat likely to hit that high mark? Not in the short term, for sure.
Because Facebook's userbase has saturated and is now leaking off.
To apps like Snapchat.
Snapchat does nothing email doesn't, and email is free. I don't own and don't want to own any device which can guarantee any message has a limited life, that's all artificial.
Better security and real privacy (messages that are private from the company itself) would be nice.
If they could make it payable via some easy method (SMS?) then people would willingly pay a small fee for the use of snapchat. Sure people would go "Bah Humbug! Snapchat want me to pay a €1" but they have a very strong userbase, one that is extremely active. In the long run, I think their user base would prefer a one off payment than being inundated with advertising.
Edit: Here is a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/QWYVFFq.png
Repeat, until the cops show up. ;)
Not really. They already have Evan Spiegel (Valleywag him) as their CEO. People who care about quality are not going to use it. "A serious hit to [the] brand" is a non-threat. What brand?
For the long term, and I don't know anything about Spiegel or Snapchat so I'm just taking your comment at face value, you are right about the negative impact a poor CEO can have. For a short-term hit to the brand, I would suggest most users neither know nor care.
The impact of the CEO over time will come from within (loss of good staff, failure to respond to market shifts etc) not external branding - as long as he doesn't go shooting elephants.
There are real issues with the quality of the app though. Maybe I'd use Snapchat if it didn't force restart my phone every time I tried to load a message...
But thanks for the downvotes anyway.
