Why Snapchat Will Soon be a Ghost Town

Adam J Bell
3 min readMar 6, 2021

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Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

When Snapchat first launched it was truly something different. Sending photos that could only be seen once was the concept.
It seemed somewhat strange to most at the beginning, but it caught on like wild fire.
Even Instagram hopped on the train and added a similar feature called “vanish mode”

Throughout the last 3 years Snapchat has been on the decline in terms of active users. Several millions people seem to no longer have a use for it, or are getting sick of what the new version have to offer.

The App was a common favourite when it came to the top 10 social medias list. Since it has been on a decline in popularity it has also started to drop on the favourites list, and is no longer in the top 10 most liked platforms.

Representation of Active Users

The interesting part is that you would assume the companies earnings would be down because of this, but that is not the case. Snapchat’s Q4 earnings in 2019 was around $15 million. In 2020, their Q4 earnings were just over 21 million.

It is no secret that the company has been trying to make their platform more monetizable by adding advertiser friendly features.
At first the platform had close to 0 ads, and like many others I really enjoyed using it.
One of these additions was the Discover tab, where content from companies and creators you don’t follow would be shown to you.
Sounds similar to Instagram’s explore page right? Yes, but it has some issues.

The Discover page of Snapchat has pretty much become a meme now as users have started to describe it as the “click-bait page”.
The main issue with the page is that there will be thumbnails and titles on clickable pieces of content but when you actually click and visit the page, what you get may be something totally different.
You may click on fails of the week, and be taken to a funny grandma video…

The reason they are facing some backlash from users is because these clickbait pieces of content have clearly just been added to the App so Snapchat can make more money. All companies have to make money we understand that, but as users we want to see the new updates come with improvements not spam.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

The popular YouTuber Drew Gooden even made a video about why the Discover Page is “an awful addition”.
You can see his video “Snapchat is so dumb” here

In conclusion, since Snapchat’s daily active user base is still above 265 million, they are no where near failing yet. The latest additions to the app have not been helping, and have actually slowed down the platforms growth.
This, alongside the similarities between Snap and Instagram’s content base, makes it somewhat hard to picture a future for the App.

Why use Snapchat instead of Instagram?

All it takes is one new feature to turn an App’s life around, let’s see what they can do in 2021!

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