In September 2011, three Stanford University students had just released one of the most popular social media apps in history after six months of planning and designing. Bobby Murphy, Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown all worked on the application as a project for one of Spiegel's classes, where his classmates balked at the idea of sending photos and videos to people for a specific amount of time and then being erased from existence. The creator experienced immediate success with the public and within a year, twenty-million 'snaps' were being sent each day even though Snapchat was only expose to iOS users. In November 2012, Snapchat was introduced to Android and had gained full exposure over the operating systems. Over the next two years the app rapid growth as the brand became popular all around the globe where in August of 2014 it was valued at $10 billion. Acknowledging the fact that Snapchat is a free service, the company needed to start building their revenue stream, which saw the first paid advertisement open up on users' devices. The advertisement aired in October 2014 in the form of a 20 second movie trailer for the horror film Ouija. While we aren't fond of the pop-up or sidebar advertisements on the world wide web, Snapchat Inc. explained their reasons about the advertisements with; "We want to see if we can deliver an experience that's fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted."
Readers, you may remember my post on the 'Discover' feature of Snapchat. This feature was introduced in January of 2015 and has since been generating revenue for the company from the ad partners of well known organisations; News.com, CNN, MTV, Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan, Food Network, National Geographic, People, Vice, Fox Sports, and Fusion. The material on the channels within the feature are viewed around one million times per day and with an estimated ten to fifteen cents per view, this is Snapchats first major, for-profit, interface feature.
Time will tell as to whether they will follow down the path of making their own content rather than having the content entirely user produced. Similarly, Youtube and Tumblr have recognised the potential behind creating their own content and transitioning into a media company as the success of Netflix and Amazon have shown that it can be done, and to also move forward in gaining competitive advantage over other competitors.
