Mind you, I've never used it, but Snapchat has 100 Million monthly uniques.
I can't think of a single company who has reached a critical-mass consumer audience and not been able to monetize. Sure, winds change, MySpaces rise and fall, but it wasn't a monetization failure.
Anecdotally, just a month ago I was walking and because i live in San Francisco I happened across a corner (Howard and New Montgomery) where there were ~20 girls about 13 years old being polled about their tastes, and the questions I heard waiting for my light was "Do you guys like smartphones?" ("yes", duh), "Is your phone more important than your TV?" ("yes", duh), and "What is your favorite app?" and the answer was unanimously Snapchat.
Snapchat is the teenagers answer to the question many millennials have fretted about -- "how will ppl born today deal with having all 18 years of their development online". The answer is: they don't put it online. It's peer-to-peer and temporary by social contract, even if the technology is imperfect.
So far, snapchat has played a savvy game. As an engineer, if they were based in SF, I'd consider working for them. They have tapped into something. Because my 28 year old wife has also been hooked on Snapchat for what seems like a lifetime now. Her most frequent contacts? Both of her 60+ year old parents, numerous cousins and aunts, etc. Her dad uses it to send stupid pictures that you might not expect from a 65 year old white haired CEO-type whose work is about as far away from tech as you can get.
digg never got big enough. Pinterest, Whatsapp are intentionally delaying revenue generation to build the userbase, a common strategy and not at all proof that they cannot monetize.
If they believe that whatever monetization method they're planning is going to stop their userbase growth, they might just as well give up. There's a lot of competition and the users can switch in an instant to something else. LINE had monetization in mind from the beginning and is still growing. Meanwhile Whatsapp is continuing to be a money sink for FB.
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I wrote this here a few weeks ago:
Mind you, I've never used it, but Snapchat has 100 Million monthly uniques.
I can't think of a single company who has reached a critical-mass consumer audience and not been able to monetize. Sure, winds change, MySpaces rise and fall, but it wasn't a monetization failure.
Anecdotally, just a month ago I was walking and because i live in San Francisco I happened across a corner (Howard and New Montgomery) where there were ~20 girls about 13 years old being polled about their tastes, and the questions I heard waiting for my light was "Do you guys like smartphones?" ("yes", duh), "Is your phone more important than your TV?" ("yes", duh), and "What is your favorite app?" and the answer was unanimously Snapchat.
Snapchat is the teenagers answer to the question many millennials have fretted about -- "how will ppl born today deal with having all 18 years of their development online". The answer is: they don't put it online. It's peer-to-peer and temporary by social contract, even if the technology is imperfect.
So far, snapchat has played a savvy game. As an engineer, if they were based in SF, I'd consider working for them. They have tapped into something. Because my 28 year old wife has also been hooked on Snapchat for what seems like a lifetime now. Her most frequent contacts? Both of her 60+ year old parents, numerous cousins and aunts, etc. Her dad uses it to send stupid pictures that you might not expect from a 65 year old white haired CEO-type whose work is about as far away from tech as you can get.
Well, there's "monetize" and there's "make a profit".
There are plenty of critical-mass consumer audience companies that failed to make a profit, some are alive only by leeching off parents, some died.
I mean, are the following companies successes or failures?
Reddit, Digg, Foursquare, ICQ, Instagram, Youtube, MySpace, Tumblr, Napster, Chatroulette
And they're the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
One could argue that Snapchat is the epitome of a fad product that should sell to a Yahoo to 'monetize'.
Twitter, just about every news site, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Digg, ...
digg never got big enough. Pinterest, Whatsapp are intentionally delaying revenue generation to build the userbase, a common strategy and not at all proof that they cannot monetize.
If they believe that whatever monetization method they're planning is going to stop their userbase growth, they might just as well give up. There's a lot of competition and the users can switch in an instant to something else. LINE had monetization in mind from the beginning and is still growing. Meanwhile Whatsapp is continuing to be a money sink for FB.