Snapchat’s Journey to its Tipping Point
With teenagers being one of the most profitable, and therefore sought-after, demographics for social media platforms, it’s no wonder that so many companies compete to stay in their good graces. Evan Spiegel’s app, Snapchat, has been able to do so unlike any other social media site today. With more American teenage users than both Facebook and Instagram, you would think its stock would be skyrocketing. Unfortunately for Spiegel, it has done the exact opposite, with stock falling twenty percent two weeks ago. Snapchat’s failure to grow alongside its main competitors have made it extremely difficult for the company to be considered a serious adversary. Most social media platforms die out after a few years of popularity, and those that have lived on past their initial life expectancies have begun to develop features so similar it’s hard to tell what their original, distinctive, purposes were. Snapchat hopes to do neither of those things. In face of the company’s recent failings, Spiegel announced that they would adopt a new format that would be both simpler and easier to use. Spiegel also announced that the company would begin selling ads using an automated system, similar to that of Facebook.
This article discusses topics included in this course such as the selling of advertisements and cascades. The article mentions briefly Facebook’s use of an automated advertisement selling system which we can assume uses an algorithm similar to the ones we have discussed and studied in class. Meanwhile, the topic of the article itself is a perfect example of and the rich-get-richer phenomenon and popularity thresholds. Facebook, for example, represents the rich-get-richer phenomenon. While Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat all have uses in the hundreds of millions, Facebook is still growing with over two billion users. Furthermore, Snapchat is struggling to reach a tipping point. It seems at the moment that the company still has a little way to go and if it fails to do so, as we have seen in class, it will decrease in popularity after the initial craze until none of its users have left. Lastly, things that will motivate people to use the app are its popularity itself. If more people use it, it’s more likely to attain new users.
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