Can Snapchat bounce back?
Many users were miffed before celebrity slams
LOS ANGELES – Sean Gerberich used to frequent the Snapchat app to communicate with friends. But now he’s all about Instagram.
He didn’t like the app update at the end of last year, when Snap separated friends and featured content, such as Vice and NBC shows, into two different buckets.
“It was harder to see my friends stuff, and I found them on Instagram,” the 18-year-old California State University Chico student said.
He’s not alone. More than 1.25 million people signed a Change.org petition begging Snapchat to revert to its previous look. Over the weekend, supermodel Chrissy Teigen became the latest celebrity ditching the messaging app, joining celebrities such as Kylie Jenner and Rihanna, who have publicly turned on Snapchat.
Teigen tweeted that due to the update, her fans have a tough time finding her. Another beef: The short-lived ad that made light of a 2009 assault of singer Rihanna by her thenboyfriend Chris Brown. In response, Rihanna in mid-March urged her fans to delete the app off their phone. Snap apologized twice for the ad, calling it “disgusting” and one that shouldn’t have appeared on the service.
But the die may have been cast. Snap Inc.’s market value lost about $800 million on Rihanna’s blast — which she made over Instagram, Snapchat’s Facebook-owned rival.
And many users are either upset about the format change or simply have moved on.
Christina Peterson, 31, who works in cybersecurity in Tillamook, Ore., doesn’t mince words when talking about Snapchat.
“It’s dead,” the former Snap user says. Adds her friend, Issac Gonzales, 24, who sells shoes in Washington state: “It will be hard picking it up when you have someone as big as Rihanna telling you to close it.”
Los Angeles-based Snap launched the redesign to make the app easier to navigate and understand, CEO Evan Spiegel said last year. He has defended the changes, recently noting that some users had felt like celebrities were their friends on Snapchat, but now they weren’t anymore.
“It will be hard picking it up when you have someone as big as Rihanna telling you to close it.”
Issac Gonzales
“And we’re like, ‘Exactly. They’re not your friend!’ ” Spiegel said at an investor’s conference, according to Recode. “So for us, even some of the frustrations we’re seeing really validate those changes.”
Snap Inc. declined to comment for this article. Located in Venice Beach, close to the haunts of Hollywood’s rich and famous, Snapchat has taken a different strategy with celebrities than rivals Instagram and Twitter.
Unlike Instagram, where celebrity’s rankings in followers and likes are clearly labeled, Snapchat keeps that information private. But blasts from widely followed stars such as Jenner and Rihanna can still hurt. Celebrities do bring “shine” to any brand, so having them on the app makes a difference, says Joshua Cohen, co-founder of Tubefilter, a blog that covers social media.
Cylus Young, 20, a college student from near Minneapolis, says he follows Justin Bieber, actor the Rock and singer Selena Gomez on Snapchat. “You want to stay up to date with what they’re doing, so it’s fun to check Snapchat and see what they’re up to.”
Social media networks that rise to viral success, then flame out, inevitably draw comparisons to MySpace. No social network was hotter than when News Corp. swept in and acquired MySpace for $580 million in 2005. By 2011, having lost hundreds of millions of us- ers to the then-new Facebook, MySpace was sold in a fire sale for $35 million, discarded again in 2016 and today barely exists.
“Snapchat is not MySpace,” insists Gene Munster, an analyst and investor with Loup Ventures. “It will still be around in five years.”
Snap is in a much different position than MySpace. For one, it’s not losing users, and it still has a very loyal base — albeit one that’s not growing as fast as analysts originally thought it would.
The company “continues to have roughly 200 million daily users, which is significant,” says Daniel Ives, analyst with GBH Insights. “Kylie and Rihanna was a setback, as was the user backlash, so this is a shaky period for Snap. But they’ll end up on the other side eventually.”
Snap went public in March 2017, closing at $24.48 a share, with a valuation of $33 billion. At the time, Snap had 158 million active daily users; today it has 187 million. But its market cap has fallen to $20 billion, and the stock sells for less than the initial IPO price.
Instagram, owned by Facebook, has more than 500 million daily users. And until a scandal over how Facebook allowed a developer to access the personal profiles of tens of millions of users — which were then sold to a political ad firm working for Donald Trump — it seemed unstoppable.
The photo-focused app had ripped off Snapchat’s Stories feature in 2016, offering a 24-hour window on photos and videos for friends. In 2017, goosed by the Facebook marketing machine, the Stories feature really took off.
Set against the backdrop of Facebook’s billion-plus daily user base, “it is hard for a platform that’s been ripped off by Instagram to compete,” Munster says. “There is value in what Snap is doing,” Munster says, by focusing on young demographics. “It’s just not going to be the moonshot many of us first thought.”
Student Xavier Hernandez, 14, from Atchinson, Kan., says he’s not giving up on Snapchat. The app “enables me to access my friends easier than Instagram does,” he says.
The same goes for Daniel Cevalos, 20, a student from Orlando. “It’s still the primary mode of communication for me,” Young says. “And it will be for a long time.”