The History of Snapchat
How it all started:
Snapchat was founded in 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy, all students at Stanford University.
The original idea was a social media app that enabled users to post photos and videos that disappeared from the site after a few moments.
Brown approached Spiegel with the idea and the duo then approached Bobby Murphy to write the code used to build the app.
In July, 2011, the co-founders released “Picaboo”, the precursor to Snapchat. The app originally only had 127 users.
In the fall of 2011, Picaboo became Snapchat.
“We’re building a photo app that doesn’t conform to unrealistic notions of beauty or perfection but rather creates a space to be funny, honest or whatever else you might feel like at the moment you take and share a Snap.”
“Photography carries a power that holds up under the relentless swirl of today’s saturated, media world, because photographs emulate the way that our mind freezes a significant moment.”
Though Snapchat does not fall into the definition of normal, polished photography, that one might see on Facebook or Instagram, it still captures and emotion and a moment in time.
Hit the ground running:
One year into its existence, Snapchat added to their features – and the user count – by introducing video to the app. The videos were only 10 seconds long, but the rollout was successful enough to push the number of snaps sent a day to 50 million. At the same time they also launched the app on the Android store.
In 2013, Snapchat followed up with two new features – “Stories” and “Chat”. The story feature enabled Snapchat users to post a series of snaps that would remain active and viewable for 24 hours.
In November 2013, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg offered Evan Speigel $3 billion for Snapchat, Speigel refused.
Snapchat continued innovating. In January 2015, they started offering many new ways for advertisers to earn money from its huge audience. Snapchat introduced Discover, a new page easily accessible from the Snapchat home screen that featured short-form ad content from a variety of different publishers and channels like Vox, BuzzFeed, CNN, and Food Network. That following September the introduced the lenses feature.
The year 2016 marked a period of change and growth for Snapchat. In February, Snapchat rolled out on-demand Geofilters for the entire Snapchat community, allowing users to create filters for parties, weddings, and private events. Then, Snapchat started auto-advancing Snapchat Story plays. If a user started watching one Story and it ended, the next one would automatically begin playing.
By June, Snapchat had amassed 150 million daily active users, surpassing Twitter. Snapchat also rolled out more video ads in June, ads that started appearing in between friends' Stories when users starting watching them.
Snapchat Memories were introduced in July, which let users save content on their device for later editing and sharing. They also introduced a collaboration with Bitstrips to create Bitmoji, a personalized avatar Snapchat users could create and incorporate into their snaps and Stories.
What’s next:
Snapchat’s user-friendliness and quickness will continue to grow in popularity, as will competition between Instagram and Snapchat. Advertisers are already spending more money on social media advertising than on TV ads, and we predict that platforms like Snapchat will continue innovating new ways to serve ads that are useful, but not disruptive, for their audiences.
https://medium.com/@mirza_ms_baig/the-fall-of-snapchat-f352e74624a7
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-snapchat