History Of Snapchat
By: Evan Frizzell
Where is all stated
According to Search Engine Journal in 2021 snapchat was ranked the number six social media platform in the world. This truly unique platform has come a long way since its founding in 2011 by Evan Spiegal, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy who were all students at Stanford University. The three founders created the new platform called “Picaboo '' in July of 2011 with the idea of being able to share photos and short clips that would disappear after a set amount of time. By September of 2011 they changed the name to 'Snapchat’ and has come to be commonly known as “Snap.” In 2014 Brown decided to walk away from the blossoming social media platform for 157 million dollars and was officially credited as a co-founder of Snapchat.
Milestones
Roughly after a year of operations, Snapchat introduced videos which upped their “snaps” to 50 million per day. Their next big milestone was in 2013 when they released “Stories” and “Chat” where the users could share multiple snaps for followers to click through and would then disappear after 24 hours. The Chat feature is used to allow users to talk and video call with their individual friends and followers. In 2014 they also released Geofilters which allowed users to customize their content and post their location at the time of the post. This was later improved upon when they allowed users to pay to make their own temporary Geofilter for any reason. Later in the same year Snapchat released Snapcash which allows users to send and receive money to each other. In 2015 they reached over 70 million users monthly and were gaining revenue from advertisements they incorporated into the platform. By 2018 99% of revenue was from advertisements alone. In 2017 Snap, Inc. went public with an initial offering of &25 billion.
Snap’s difficulties
Snapchat has had a few difficulties since its founding in 2011. In 2013 they were hacked by an anonymous group. This anonymous group revealed personal information of 4.6 million users. In the aftermath of this hack Snapchat apologized and repaired the breach. They have not had a major security breach in this incident. In the next year the U.S. Federal Trade Commission accused Snapchat of exaggerating the process they used to protect users' privacy and saying that they can not “guarantee” the security of users' messages. In the end Snapchat was not officially charged by the FTC. The FTC decided to not charge them as long as they agreed to be monitored for the next 20 years. In 2015 Snapchat’s founder, Evan Spiegel, was sued by a company staffer who said that comments were made by Spiegel stating that he wanted to only expand into “rich” countries and stay far away from any poorer country such as India. After the lawsuit, Snapchat’s stock share fell by 1% but the company had no long lasting negative impacts and Spiegel said that the notion of only focusing on “rich” countries is “ridiculous.”
Future of Snap
In the near future Snapchat plans on launching an app store to allow users to download games they have made for within Snapchat. This would also allow for outside developers to contribute to the games and help with the augmented reality side of the games. Snapchat hopes that this will allow them to continue to be the largest non-Facebook social network. Bobby Murphy has stated that he believes augmented reality will be the next major shift in technology. They are beginning the early stages of setting up their company to go into this direction and will continue to announce more about it in the future.
Sources:
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/history-of-snapchat
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media/biggest-social-media-sites/