Dylan Tweney
VentureBeat

Engagement to die for: Snapchat has 100M daily users, 65% of whom upload photos

Successful CMOs achieve growth by leveraging technology. Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we’ll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited. Request your personal invitation here! RANCHO PALOS VERDES, California — Snapchat has such enga
Dylan Tweney 2 min read
Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat, at Code 2015.

Successful CMOs achieve growth by leveraging technology. Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we’ll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited. Request your personal invitation here!


RANCHO PALOS VERDES, California — Snapchat has such engaged customers that chief executive Evan Spiegel doesn’t even bother counting the app’s monthly active users.

MAUs is the metric championed by Facebook and subsequently used by many social media companies as a way of counting engaged users, rather than people who just registered at one point but never bother to log on. But monthly is too slow for Spiegel.

Instead, the company measures daily — and even hourly — active users.

Spiegel said onstage today at the Code Conference that Snapchat has close to 100 million daily active users “in developed countries.”

More than that, 65 percent of those people actually contribute content — snaps and stories — of their own, which is a remarkably high level of active engagement.

Spiegel also said that Vodafone has attributed 75 percent of its customers’ upload bandwidth usage in the U.K. to Snapchat.

In short, Snapchat has fanatically engaged customers. What it does with that customer base is still to be determined, but advertising is certainly part of the whole picture — but not the whole picture.

“We believe that great businesses need multiple sources of revenue,” Spiegel said, and said the company is investigating other sources. But in the meantime, that fanatic level of engagement is certainly an attractive target for advertisers.

Still, Spiegel said, the company is not designing with brand advertisers in mind.

“We’re building Snapchat for people, not for brands,” Spiegel said.

How he describes the app is particularly interesting, given that it’s grown beyond merely sharing ephemeral photos and into creating and sharing “stories” (chronological arrangements of photos and text) and even into journalism and media, with its Discover service.

Snapchat is fundamentally about “entertainment,” Spiegel said.

And he’s trying to make it grow incredibly fast, he said, while maintaining those really high levels of engagement.

“For me the mandate is to grow as fast as humanly possible, and then find absolutely astounding people who really want to go where we want to go, and then give them autonomy to go do that.”

More information:

Powered by VBProfiles


VentureBeat’s VB Insight team is studying marketing and personalization…
Chime in here, and we’ll share the results.

More information:

Powered by VBProfiles

Originally published on VentureBeat » Dylan Tweney: http://ift.tt/1AsK6Uk

Share
More from Dylan Tweney
VentureBeat

Can the Kindle Fire disrupt the tablet market? Not so fast

The arrival of Amazon’s Kindle Fire, a $199 tablet, in a market dominated by $500 models looks like an obvious case of price disruption. Not so fast, says Horace Dediu, an analyst at Asymco: Amazon’s margins are too thin to allow it to compete on the tablet’s core technology. It’s an interesting cou
Dylan Tweney 1 min read
VentureBeat

First iPhone in space to launch with last shuttle mission

When the final space shuttle mission launches later this year, two iPhone 4s will be on board. The iPhones will be running an experimental app called SpaceLab for iOS, designed by Odyssey Space Research. Once the space shuttle Atlantis docks with the International Space Station, crew members will us
Dylan Tweney 1 min read

Dylan Tweney

If you're bored, you're not paying attention

Great! You’ve successfully signed up.

Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.

You've successfully subscribed to Dylan Tweney.

Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.

Success! Your billing info has been updated.

Your billing was not updated.