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Can anyone explain to me how they're worth $3 billion dollars? They haven't produced anything, they haven't advanced humanity, they have the eyeballs of teens - for the moment, until something cooler comes along. Are they really that valuable? It doesn't seem like there's any show stoppers for creating a snapchat clone (rather than having X users at the moment), and if snapchat were to start making money - say by sending ads to endorse a product rather than a user generated picture, people would probably start leaving the platform towards the newest green pasture.

I recently got a new phone, and I got hooked in to all the services my friends were talking about in recent memory - instagram's dead, twitter's dead, snap chat is in flux. Not for all users, but in my group of friends these services aren't used as much. There isn't really anything keeping you from moving onto something new - your digital life isn't really that valuable. It's probably better to not read the conversations you had a year ago. The pictures are always nice, that's probably the only thing that people would care about, but with Snapchat they're gone (unless you hit save). I'm not sure what I'm getting at, but this company isn't worth $3 billion dollars.




When Facebook first reported strong earnings on Oct. 30, the stock was up ~15% in after-hours trading or ~$18 billion in market value.

Those gains were basically wiped out when the CFO said, "We did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens."

With that one comment $18B in value disappeared.

I have no idea if Snapchat is worth $3B but what happened Oct 30 should give you an idea of how valuable that demographic is to Facebook.

On a side note, Google should buy Snapchat and integrated it into Youtube and use it as their new commenting platform (half kidding)


very well said!


You are worth as much as the problem you solve for the buying party.

Facebook is (rightly or wrongly) perceived by the market as:

1) Losing its cool

2) Suffering from user flight

3) Still not offering significant competition to short-message social networking

For a $116B company, offering 2.8% of its total value to fight off what might be a a future 20%+ loss in value is a no brainer.


Interestingly, instagram has taken on a new life for preteens who can't convince their parents to allow a chat app. The kids are using the posting function as a pseudo-chat feature.


Snapchat is a threat to Facebook, just as Instagram was. They want to control it, the price doesnt matter much.




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