Image via Asa Mathat for Re/code
I am not a Snapchatter, and I will be the first to admit it. As someone over 30, I feel too old for it already. I tried it for a day, desperately trying to find which of my friends was on the platform and ended up sending two snaps to myself bemoaning the fact that I am too old for Snapchat.
That said, I cannot help to be a bit under the spell of Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s secretive CEO. Snapchat’s story is a fascinating one of fast growth, and Spiegel says that he’s approaching 100 million daily active users in “developed markets” — with 65 percent of those users creating content every day. That adds up to 700 million photos and videos per day. Spiegel said that he learned from the Vodafone CEO that 75 percent of upload traffic in the UK is #Snapchat.
On stage at Code Conference 2015, where Spiegel made an appearance tonight, Kara Swisher of Re/code said she and her colleagues usually call Snapchat the ephemeral messaging service. But what would Spiegel call it?
Entertainment, he said.
Entertainment. So is Snapchat a media company? What is a media company anymore? And what is keeping any media company afloat anymore? Just before Code Conference kicked off, it was announced that Re/code is being purchased by Vox Media, as part of Vox’s CEO’s plan to create a kind of Time Inc. for the digital age.
Probably the most prominent feature of Snapchat that qualifies it as media company is Discover, which allows users to see editorial content from a range of partners. Spiegel admits that Snapchat is still trying to understand how to be a publishing platform, but it’s coming.
Spiegel snuck in a few surprises about Snapchat: 1) they are planning on a IPO and 2) Snapchat may soon let you view videos without holding your thumb on the screen. One thing Spiegel was coy about was music. He wouldn’t say if his team is working on anything with music but he hinted strongly at a personal interest in music, and he said that if they did build something, it would be more than a distribution plan.
“We’re interested in what people really want from music,” he said. “There’s got to be something better than a track listing.”
So maybe that’s something to keep an eye on, especially if Snapchat turns out to be an entertainment company after all…
