Vanishing-photo app hasn’t disappeared

Snapchat evolves to avoid fading out

New York — Snapchat has managed to build something lasting out of photos that vanished almost instantly.

The fast-growing social network for millennials has come a long way since its founder Evan Spiegel dropped out of Stanford University in 2012, three classes shy of graduation. His goal at the time was to create a snappy way for people to send photos, videos and messages — all of which would disappear just 10 seconds after viewing.

Snapchat cut a sharp contrast to Facebook and other social networks, which encouraged people to share and share often — even those spontaneous moments they might come to regret the next morning or at the next job interview. Snapchat, by contrast, let people “show and share things that they do not want to last on the internet as a permanent record,” said Ira Kalb, a marketing and branding them up, which is nice. Every day you can go to see what’s new.”

Snap’s ad revenue has jumped from $59 million in 2015 to nearly $367 million in 2016, according to eMarketer. It’s on pace to have more monthly active users than Twitter — which counts 317 million — by the end of the year. Of course, that is still dwarfed by Facebook, with 1.79 billion monthly active users as of Sept. 30.

Learning to grow

But while Snap is popular with the coveted 18- to 34-year old audience, it will eventually have to broaden its appeal to grow.

“It’s a great base to start with, (but) ultimately they need to become a little bit broader in terms of appeal to users in order to become broader in terms of appeal to advertisers,” Gartner analyst Brian Blau said.

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“Ultimately they need to become a little bit broader in terms of appeal to users in order to become broader in terms of appeal to advertisers.”