PATTERN RECOGNITION
TOBY SHAPSHAK: Snapped up right from the start
As expected, the Snapchat listing has been impressive and the largest since Alibaba’s in 2014
If you want to see the changing nature of social media, look at Snap’s listing last week. The Snapchat parent listed at three times the value of Twitter. It was valued at US$24bn on its first day and $28bn on its second. This is the biggest IPO since Alibaba’s $168bn listing in 2014. And it still doesn’t make money. In fact, on revenue of $404m last year, it lost $514m. In 2015 it lost $373m. But the hype appears to be over its very active user base of millennials, who check the app up to 18 times a day. Of its 158m users, two-thirds update their content daily. That means 100m people are putting up videos of themselves on the app, using its special effects like rainbows, funny glasses and other filters.When Snapchat first began, it was best known for images that self-destruct, but it has since become the poster child for what we should be calling Social Media 2.0 (or is it 3.0?). Snapchat’s filters and "Stories" have prompted Facebook — which offered its founders $3bn for a buyout a...
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