Snapchat parent shares soar on first quarterly profit

SAN FRANCISCO, United States - Shares in Snap soared on Thursday after the firm behind image-centric, ephemeral messaging app Snapchat reported its first-ever quarter profit.

Shares that had been dragged down by worries about the broader market and concerns about tightened iPhone privacy making it tougher to target ads launched nearly 60 percent on earnings that beat expectations.

Snap ended last year with a loss trimmed to $488 million, and posted a net income of $22.5 million in the final three months of the year.

"2021 was an exciting year for Snap and we made significant progress growing our business and serving our global community," chief executive Evan Spiegel said in an earnings release.

He added that strength in Snap's core business has allowed it to invest in augmented reality, "transforming the way that the Snapchat community experiences the world through our camera."

Snapchat became a hit, particularly with young smartphone users, by letting people share moments in the form of photos or videos in messages that self-destruct after being viewed.

Popular features in the app included "lenses" that allow people to overlay special effects on pictures.

Snap has since redefined itself as a "camera company," launching Spectacles sunglasses that have built in cameras and synch to smartphones.

Snap revenue for the recently ended quarter was $1.3 billion, a 42 percent increase from the same period a year earlier.

"Snapchat ended 2021 on a high note, exceeding our expectations for ad revenue," said Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg.

"Snapchat is clearly not as prone to the 'TikTok effect' as Meta, with strong daily active user growth in all regions."

Competition from short-form video sharing sensation TikTok helped bruise Facebook-parent Meta, which saw its ranks of daily users shrink for the first time in the final three months of last year.

While Snap earnings felt the sting of supply chain woes and changes to iPhone operating software that make it tougher to target online ads, it was "buoyed by banner quarters" earlier quarters in the year, according to Enberg.

The California-based company says at its website that Snapchat is used daily by an average of 319 million people.

Snap revenue for 2021 was $4.1 billion, up 64 percent from the previous year, according to its earnings report.

Agence France-Presse

Can Facebook's $1 billion gamble help it regain lost cool?

Like internet personalities the world over, Kenyan TikTok comedian Mark Mwas was intrigued when Facebook announced a $1 billion plan to pay content creators like him. 

But the 25-year-old, whose following surged past 160,000 as entertainment-starved Kenyans flocked to the app during the pandemic, is sceptical that fans would follow him to the older social network. 

"In our market, Facebook is kinda old-fashioned," said Mwas, who posts skits about campus life in a mixture of Swahili, English, and Sheng slang. 

"Like, Mom is on Facebook and doesn't know what TikTok is," he told AFP in an email. "My content is suited for the millennials, who prefer other platforms." 

Announced last week, Facebook's $1 billion will pay the creators of popular posts, from fashionistas to comedians and video gamers, through 2022.

It is the strongest signal yet that the US social media giant now recognises the strategic importance of the "creator economy". 

YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat have waged an increasingly fierce battle to attract figures with big followings that can in turn attract serious advertising revenues. 

Last November, photo and video app Snapchat began paying $1 million a day to top creators, although the payments have since tapered off. Popular YouTubers have been receiving a slice of the site's billions in ad revenues since 2007. 

Facebook has been comparatively slow on the uptake. While the site began paying popular video-makers in 2017, most vloggers have found YouTube to be far more lucrative. 

Facebook-owned Instagram has meanwhile launched the careers of many a food blogger and fashion influencer, but the app only began sharing its advertising income directly with them last year.

Traditionally, the bulk of Insta-celebrities' earnings has come through product endorsement deals negotiated directly with brands. 

- Late to the influencer party - 

Joe Gagliese, co-founder of international influencer agency Viral Nation, said it was not surprising that Facebook's efforts had lagged behind competitors'.

Founded in 2004, Facebook had already built a hugely lucrative advertising business by the time the phenomenon of full-time internet celebrities emerged at the end of the decade. Courting influencers wasn't crucial to its "primary business", Gagliese said. 

But as creators have headed elsewhere, their predominantly young followings have followed -- contributing to a sense that Facebook, in the eyes of Gen Z, has become an irredeemably uncool website where their parents hang out. 

Facebook's user base is indeed ageing. The proportion of over-65s has shot up roughly a quarter over the past year -- almost double the average, according to the Digital 2021 report from media companies We Are Social and Hootsuite. 

In the meantime, Chinese-owned TikTok was the world's most downloaded app in the first half of 2021.

It has largely replaced Facebook as the driver of international social media crazes -- not least during the pandemic, as bored millions have turned to its dance videos and cooking trends for light relief. 

In this context, Facebook's $1 billion gambit is being seen partly as an attempt to regain cultural relevance and stem the youth exodus. 

"The only way for these platforms to keep their relevance with younger generations is to understand what resonates with them and keep up with the pace of innovation," said Claudia Cameron, head of marketing and insights at Amsterdam-based influencer agency IMA.

"Creators are a very important part of this equation, as they set the tone for what's cool."

- A drop in the ocean? - 

While young users from Iran to Brazil have been flocking elsewhere, industry insiders say it is far too early to regard Facebook as doomed. 

"You can't underestimate them, because they are so powerful when it comes to the tech," said Gagliese. 

Facebook's vast income -- it raked in $84.2 billion in advertising revenues last year, more than the GDP of some countries -- gives it huge funds with which to innovate. 

It is also, despite its relative loss of street cred, still growing, with 2.8 billion monthly users worldwide. 

Gagliese suggested Facebook should be spending far more on its efforts to lure internet stars from other platforms. 

"Unless Facebook leans in really hard -- I'm talking, 'way more than a billion dollars' hard -- it's going to be very hard for them to attract all these new creators," he said. 

Facebook has yet to outline detailed plans for the $1 billion, but Cameron pointed out that a large chunk will likely be distributed via Instagram, which still enjoys a "cool" factor.

That would be good news for TikTok comedian Mwas, who also has a sizeable following there. 

"I'm taking a wait-and-see approach," he said.

Agence France-Presse

OH SNAP! | Hackers expose trove of snagged Snapchat images

SAN FRANCISCO — A huge trove of evidently intercepted Snapchat images and videos were exposed online Friday, raising fears about what may be revealed in messages intended to vanish seconds after beng viewed.

In what was being referred to as “The Snappening,” people who used a third-party program instead of the official Snapchat application had copies of supposedly transient missives squirreled away by hackers who began posting them online late Thursday.

About half of Snapchat users are reported to be 17 years old or younger, raising worries that sexy self-shot images they thought would disappear will be shared on the Internet in what would amount to child pornography.

Snapchat released a statement Friday saying the startup’s servers were not breached, nor were they the source of the leaked images.

The San Francisco-based company maintained that “Snapchatters were victimized” due to the use of outside applications to send or receive “Snaps” in a practice prohibited under the startup’s terms of service.

Outside applications being eyed as sources for purloined Snapchat pictures are designed to let users undermine the intent of the service by keeping copies of self-destructing pictures sent or received.

Malicious apps

Unsanctioned mobile applications that basically hack into Snapchat have apparently been gathering copies of messages for years, storing them at a computer or computers online.

Hackers boasted a 13 gigabyte library of imagery, according to a report at news website Business Insider.

“Anybody who saw all those third-party Snapchat hack apps in the App Store should have seen it coming,” said Nico Sell, founder of encrypted mobile messaging service Wickr and an organizer of the DefCon gathering of hackers annually in Las Vegas.

“You could tell that those were semi-malicious apps.”

That is among reasons Wickr blocks third-party apps from working with the service, and why its messages “see no other computer” than the one they are sent to, according to Sell.

“Technically, it could have been solved,” Sell said of The Snappening.

“It could also be solved by the ecosystem not letting those apps exist.”

Users of anonymity focused online forum 4chan have been downloading the swiped Snapchat messages and are constructing a searchable online archive, Business Insider reported.

The boasted 13 gigabytes of files could equal about a billion low-resolution images, by some estimates.

Snapchat rocketed to popularity, especially among teens, after the initial app was released in September 2011. Created by then Stanford University students, the app allows the sending of messages that disappear shortly after being viewed.

source: interaksyon.com

Candy Crush, Vine, Snapchat among top smartphone apps of 2013

TORONTO — Snapchat, Vine, and Candy Crush Saga earned coveted spots on smartphones this year, making them among the most downloaded apps of the year.

There are more than a million apps on Apple Inc’s App Store and Google Inc’s Play store, the two dominant marketplaces for apps, which see billions of downloads each year.

The remarkable rise of the European hybrid market [For Advisers]
Continue reading >>
This year, the most downloaded apps were new takes on communication, gaming, and entertainment, according to mobile app experts.

“2013 was a really interesting year in terms of maturation, milestones and new trends,” said Craig Palli, chief strategy officer at Fiksu, a mobile marketing company based in Boston.

“The most downloaded apps were in familiar categories, but offered new twists,” he added.

While old favorites such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter — available for iPhone, Android and other devices – continued to be popular ways of communicating with friends, Snapchat eclipsed them in downloads in 2013, becoming the sixth most downloaded free app of the year on the App Store, according to Apple.

“Snapchat went from being a niche app to achieving much more critical mass, so much so that Facebook was reportedly willing to spend billions of dollars to acquire the company,” said Palli.

With Snapchat, users can send photos and videos that disappear shortly after they are viewed.

Launched in 2011, the app’s user base continued to grow rapidly in 2013, with over 13 million people using the app in October, according to the latest available estimates from global information and measurement company Nielsen. In December alone, over 400 million pieces of content were shared through the app, according to Snapchat, based in Venice, CA.

Vine, a video sharing app released earlier this year by microblogging company Twitter Inc, was the fourth most downloaded free app in 2013. The app, for iPhone, Android and other devices, allows users to share videos under six seconds in length. Nielsen estimates over 6 million people in the US were using the app in October of this year.

Snapchat and Vine fall into a category that mobile analytics firm Flurry calls camera-enhanced messaging, which they said grew eightfold in 2013.

“The communications category underwent phenomenal growth this year. Messaging apps like Snapchat, Line, Kakao (KakaoTalk) and WeChat are all exploding and becoming bigger than the carriers in their home countries in terms of users,” said Simon Khalaf, chief executive of San Francisco-based company Flurry.

Crushing Saga

Games were another popular category, with Candy Crush Saga for iPhone, Android and Kindle Fire securing its position as the top downloaded free app, and as the top revenue grossing app. It has been downloaded over 500 million times since its launch last year, according to its creator King, based in the UK. Nielsen estimates that over 20 million people in the US were playing the game in October of this year.

In the entertainment category, Pandora continued to be the leading way to stream music and was the ninth most downloaded, and third top grossing, app in 2013.

“Clearly the device has swallowed radio,” said Palli. “Despite the new entrants, Pandora remains the dominant player in the space,” he added.

But the biggest trend of 2013, according to Palli, is the emergence of apps as a way to control companion devices, which he believes will continue to grow in 2014.

On Christmas Day, apps that pair with devices were among some of the top downloaded apps on the App Store.

The Fitbit app, for iPhone and Android, pairs with an electronic wristband to track metrics such as steps taken, distance traveled, and calories burned. It was the 16th most downloaded app on December 25, according to Palli, who monitored the Apple rankings.

Other apps that pair with devices, such as Chromecast, UP by Jawbone, and GoPro were also among the top downloads that day.

Khalaf predicts that apps for televisions will be the trend to watch for 2014.

“I think 2014 could be the year the TV industry gets disrupted by mobile,” said Khalaf.

“If you think about it, every American spends $100+ dollars per month on a service that is not personalized and not mobile. It’s an area that’s ripe for disruption and I think someone will come up with new content, maybe a new device and more importantly a better business model.”

source: interaksyon.com