Another 12 months have flown by. As we look back at this year in tech, The Verge staff members are grading each major company and product category in the industry on how they fared in 2016.
Snapchat’s the cool kid in school. So on trend, that in 2016 it decided to go by its nickname “Snap” to disassociate itself from chat. It worked for Cher when she dropped the “Sonny &,” and it worked for Apple when it dropped “Computer” to more closely align with its broader ambitions.
Snap is already slinking its way into consumer electronics with the launch of the brilliantly marketed Spectacles in November. The colorful $130 sunglasses were initially only available from a single bright yellow vending machine in Venice Beach, California. Lines formed immediately, driving the price up to several hundred dollars on the grey market. Even now, more than a month later, supply is so constrained and demand so high that the specs still sell for nearly double the price on sites like eBay. Snap’s not making iPhone money off the effort yet, but it sure is stoking desire. And its timing is impeccable.
You can see why investors are stoked by Snap
Last month, Reuters said Snap had filed for an initial public offering with the hope of being valued at over $30 billion when it debuts in 2017. Back in May, Snapchat was valued at just $20 billion — but well above the $3 and $4 billion bids offered by Facebook and Google, respectively, back in 2013. Expectations are certainly high, as they should be. This “decacorn” attracts an estimated 150 million active users each day, about 60 percent of whom are aged 13 to 24 — a demographic that’s very attractive to advertisers. Just imagine those 150 million users wearing Spectacles to the beach where they pull their official Snapchat towel out of their official Snapchat backpack. You can see why investors are stoked by Snap’s diversified sources of revenue as it closes out the year.
Snapchat
Snap’s been so successful this year that it attracted the attention of the bully in the social media schoolyard: Facebook. Facebook has a long history of copying Snapchat features but things accelerated in August. That’s when Facebook introduced Instagram Stories, a near-perfect replica of Snapchat’s three-year-old stories feature. Facebook then added Snapchat-like photo filters to the camera on the main Facebook app in October, and to the Messenger camera in December. It’s now testing stories inside the Messenger app.