I'm surprised by the number of comments about how much money they've been losing. Their finances right now are completely irrelevant to their eventual success or failure. All that matters is getting a huge number of highly engaged users.
The attention of many hundreds of millions or billions of people is a very valuable resources that they will have no problem selling. Keep in mind that there is a limited amount of human attention in the world, and it's a zero-sum game to control it. As Facebook has discovered, owning a huge amount of attention gives you a ton of leverage over advertisers who want to buy it. Being in the long tail of smaller attention-holders gives you much less.
So Snap will either grow to compete with TV and Facebook as one of the top attention-holders, or else they'll fizzle out into irrelevance, burning through gobs of cash along the way.
I mean, sure, they could aim to be a nice $500 million company that builds a product that makes people happy and makes their employees comfortably upper middle class. But that's clearly not their ambition so there's no point in discussing their finances as if it were.
The attention of many hundreds of millions or billions of people is a very valuable resources that they will have no problem selling. Keep in mind that there is a limited amount of human attention in the world, and it's a zero-sum game to control it. As Facebook has discovered, owning a huge amount of attention gives you a ton of leverage over advertisers who want to buy it. Being in the long tail of smaller attention-holders gives you much less.
So Snap will either grow to compete with TV and Facebook as one of the top attention-holders, or else they'll fizzle out into irrelevance, burning through gobs of cash along the way.
I mean, sure, they could aim to be a nice $500 million company that builds a product that makes people happy and makes their employees comfortably upper middle class. But that's clearly not their ambition so there's no point in discussing their finances as if it were.