The History of Snapchat!
by Jack Hammell
The Inception of Snapchat
Snapchat has been a main social media platform for years. But how did it reach this popularity? Well to start, Snapchat was created in 2011, so the platform is not even 15 years old and still relatively young. Snapchat was created by Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy, who were all students at Stanford University. Each of the original creators all had part in the idea of how snapchat would work, and or how the app would be coded. In July, 2011, the co-founders released “Picaboo”, the precursor to Snapchat. Right afterward, Spiegel and Murphy forced Brown out of the company, and decided to relaunch the company as Snapchat in September, 2011.
Originally, Snapchat really had a big fanbase of younger users. Kids loved sending back and fourth pictures that would eventually disappear. In fact, in a 2013 interview with The Telegraph, Evan Spiegel, one of the creator of Snapchat honed in on the real reason Snapchat was such a hit with younger social media users. He said it was because they didn’t want their social media history coming back to haunt them. He went on to say, “Snapchat changed that perception of deleting something as bad,” he said. “Online, typically you delete something if it’s bad or if it’s really embarrassing."
Adding Videos?
After being created in 2011, it only took until 2012 for Snapchat to decide to add videos, up to 10 seconds, to add to their platform. The addition of this feature ended up making more than 50 million snaps be sent per day.
Stories and Chat functions
A personal favorite feature has to be the Snapchat “Stories.” Stories basically is a way for a user to post something for all users to see and can replay it. It stays active for 24 hours and allows all your friends to see what you are doing on a given day. This feature, along with a simple chat feature, were introduced to Snapchat in 2013. Though users really enjoy Snapchat stories and it is a more intuitive feature, it was really the chat feature that was more appealing at the time and was used for many users to chat with their friends who maybe did not have cell phones but iPods and other devices.
In 2014, this chat function advanced with a live option to chat that included video and audio calling. This once again helped the app explode and helped rival phone’s and features like FaceTime or Skype.
2015 Booming Stats
In 2015, Snapchat had on average 75 million users per month. Snapchat started to use advertisements on their app and helped Snapchat make some money. According to Snapchat, by 2018 99% of their revenue came from advertising. The most popular feature that Snapchat had to offer at the time was actually their video feature. According to snapchat, there were six billion videos sent per day just three years after video was introduced on the site, an impressive feat.
Memories
In April of 2016, Bloomberg reported that they had over 10 billion video views per day, which actually surpassed a major competitor, Facebook. Additionally, in June, Snapchat had over 150 million daily users, which also surpassed another giant, Twitter.
Fast forward to July, and Snapchat decided to introduce a new feature called Snapchat Memories. This let people save their videos to remember them for a later time. Snapchat also went as far as letting those videos and pictures that were posted to your story reappear on the same day every year for you to see what you were doing “a year ago today.”
Since then there has not been much movement for Snapchat, they have Snap Maps, where you can see where your friends on Snapchat are, and also now have their own video news platform. But overall, Snapchat knows its users and what they want and have kept their app relatively simple since their boom in 2016. Fast forward to today and Snapchat is now one of the most successful social networking app in the world.
Sources Referenced:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-snapchat
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/history-of-snapchat