Snapchat is a mobile application used for multimedia and image messaging. It has 166 million active users every day as of May 2017. In Snapchat, pictures and messages are accessible for a short time, and then it cannot be accessed. It was initially developed to be a selfie app and was called “Picaboo”.
History & Wiki
In July 2011, “Picaboo” was created by former Stanford University’s students Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy. In September 2011, the app was relaunched as Snapchat. By May 2012, Snapchat was processing more than 25 images per second. By October 2012, it was sharing 20 million images in a day, and in the same month, it released its Android app. In December of the same year, they released video sharing options.
One of the co-founders of Snapchat, Reginald Brown sued the company in February 2013 to negotiate his share in the ownership of the company. He was accused of committing fraud against Murphy and Spiegel. It was settled in September 2014, when Brown received $157.5 million from Spiegel and Murphy.
As of May 2015, the users of the app were sending more than 2 billion videos in a day. By November it reached 6 billion. By 2016, it had reached 10 billion video views in a single day. In the same year, the app had more than 10 million users in the UK. As of February 2017, the daily users went up to 166 million by May.
The company was renamed to Snap Inc., in September 2016. It also introduced the first hardware gadget of the company called ‘Spectacles’. It was a pair of smartglasses which has a feature of an inbuilt camera and can record videos of 10 seconds at a time. It became for sale online in February 2017.
The headquarters of Snap Inc. is located in Venice, Los Angeles, California.
Snapchat
Features of Snapchat
It is primarily used for creating and sending multimedia messages. The messages are known as “snaps”. In 2014, a feature called “Geofilters” was added. It allows a user with certain geographical locations. Prior to that, the video chat feature was also added.
In September 2015, it introduced for additional replays in the in-app purchases. The extra purchase replays were removed by the company in April 2016.
It has also introduced another feature which lets users receive and send money called “Snapcash”. “Memories” was added in July 2016. In August of the same year, the company launched the feature Geostickers. World Stickers was also added in April 2017. It later allowed users to add links and enabled them to direct view of the websites. Other added features include “Discover”, “Custom Series”, and “Chat 2.0”.
Communication
Snapchat has been described primarily as a camera company. It has never been compared with Twitter or Facebook. It was seen to represent a new direction in social media. It puts focus on “transient nature of brief encounters”.
Demographics
It is primarily used to send picture messages. In research, it was found that 1.6% of users use it for sexting. However, the majority of the users use it for general purposes and 14.2% people admitted to sending sexual content from the app.
Awards & Achievements
In 2013, Snapchat was awarded the Best Mobile App at the Crunchies Awards. The award was received by Evan Spiegel. Snapchat has been downloaded over 500 million times on Android alone.
Net Worth of Snapchat
As of December 2024, the estimated net worth of Snapchat is approximately $25 billion. The market value was made available with the IPO (initial public offering). It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2017.
In 2013, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offered to buy Snapchat for a price of $3 billion but was rebuffed by Snapchat founders.