To stop copying, Snapchat shares – TechCrunch



[ad_1]

Evan Spiegel has finally found a way to defend himself against Mark Zuckerberg's army of clones. For two and a half years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road against Facebook, Spiegel claiming that "our values ​​are hard to copy." This inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accumulate more than a billion daily users of Stories on Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, compared to 186 million daily users in total. Meanwhile, the entire technology industry was striving to realize Snap's vision of an ephemeral visual future.

But Snapchat's new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social Web that is afraid of being crushed under Facebook's startup. He reorganizes the adage of "if you can not beat them, join them" in "to beat them, join us". As a unified front, Snap's partners have the infrastructure they need to focus on what sets them apart, while Snapchat gains the reach and rootedness needed to overcome the war.

Tinder allows you to use Snapchat's stories as profile photos.

Snapchat's plan is to let other applications integrate the best elements rather than create their own half-price copies.

Why reinvent the wheel of stories, bitmoji and commercials when you can reuse the original? A senior Snap executive said on the merits that it was the strategy. If he has to invent these products and others want something similar, it is smarter to activate and partly control the snapchatification than to try to ignore it. . Otherwise, Facebook could be the first to give what Snap inspired everyone.

The "camera company" has corrected its course and regained control of its fate this week at its first-ever Snap Partner Summit in its hometown of Los Angeles. Now it's a camera Platform thanks to Snap Kit. His new Story Kit will implement Snapchat Stories in other apps later this year. They can display a more traditional carousel of stories from your friends or insert them into their application in a custom format. The Houseparty Stories carousel shows what your friends know how to do outside the group video chat app. Tinder will allow you to show your Snapchat story alongside your photos to seduce potential matches. But the camera stays in Snapchat, with new options to share with these apps stories.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel presents Snap partners at the summit

This is how Snapchat is colonizing the ecosystem of native apps in the same way that Facebook has invaded the Web with the J button. Snap's strong privacy record encourages these partners to host it where they might fear that Facebook and its history with Cambridge Analytica will tarnish their brand.

Instead of watching these other apps reveal mini-competitors that further fragment the world of Stories, Snap saves developers the slow, expensive chore while instantly providing them with the best tools in their class to reinforce their own engagement. Each post makes your Snapchat account a little more essential, gives your camera a new utility and reminds you to come back. This is another reason to stay with Snap rather than moving away from other versions of Stories.

If Spiegel knows what's going on, he'll set up resources with the Story Kit partnership team so that he can create as many applications as possible before Facebook can also copy that idea. For now, Snap does not inject ads into app stories, but can easily do so and share cash with its host. This would attract partners, generate revenue and give Snap advertisers greater reach.

Houseparty integrates Snapchat's stories

Whatever the case may be, Snap will mark these benefits with its new development kit. Later this year, the Snapchat Audience Network will be launched, allowing partners to host Snap's full-screen, vertical video ads and get undisclosed revenue sharing to date. They will not need to build an ad sales force or bid and broadcast, but simply drop an SDK to start showing ads for both users and non-viewers. -users of Snapchat. The company's message is again that it is becoming easier to cooperate with Snapchat than to copy it.

Snap's new advertising network

Giving advertisers more scope and reusability for Snap's somewhat proprietary ad unit format allows Snap to meet its biggest challenge – scale. The 186 million users of Snap may seem modest compared to Instagram, Facebook or YouTube, especially since this figure dropped in Q2 and Q3 before stabilizing in Q4 last year. It is therefore more difficult for advertisers to justify the heavy expense related to Snapchat. Ad Kit and possibly Story Kit give Snap a greater reach even without user growth.

The extra size could tip the card in favor of Snap, given its popularity with an extremely large demographic. Snapchat now reaches 75% of Americans aged 13 to 34 and 90% of 13-24 year olds. It now claims to reach more younger people than Facebook in the most lucrative countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Australia.

Facebook has massively neglected this segment. Example: The sticker feature of Facebook Messenger, popular with children, has not improved much since its launch in 2013, which, I hear, was a struggle for internal approval. Meanwhile, Snapchat continues to develop its lead on virtual identity with Bitmoji. Now, Snap will allow you to put your custom Bitmoji avatar on the face of your FitBit watch, use it to joke about Venmo shopping and even represent you with one of its new multiplayer gaming games.

Once again, Snap wants his partners to integrate the reality, rather than trying to create a half-thirsty facsimile of Bitmoji. Surprisingly, Facebook's avatars have been in development for more than a year, and Apple's Memoji still can not escape iMessage and FaceTime. That's why Snapchat would be well advised to try to make Bitmoji an ubiquitous way to portray itself without a photo. Facebook's lack of design and Bitmoji's massive advance length with this differentiated product is a powerful way for Snap to immisce in partnerships.

Snap needs all possible help to enable the underdog to create a substantial and sustainable social network. Teaming was the theme of the rest of the Snap Partner Summit. Netflix, GoFundMe, VSCO and Anchor allow users to share stickers and publishers such as the Washington Post to share articles in Snapchat. Zynga and ZeptoLab have created real-time multiplayer Snap Games that live in chat and are a smart way to drag ads into the messenger.

Snapchat's new Augmented Reality Scan utility platform has engaged Giphy and Photomath, as well as former partners Shazam and Amazon, to help you get more interactivity from your environment. And as the physical world is too vast for a developer to experience RA experiences, Snap has beefed up its Lens Studio platform with new models and designer profiles. Facebook may be able to clone the features of Snap, but not its army of developers.

"If we can show the right goal at the right time, we can inspire a whole new world of creativity," says Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy. . From partnerships to utilities to toys, all new ads draw the attention of Snapchat's camera. This makes him mature to become the fan of augmented reality of the world.

This seems to be a moment of adulthood for Snapchat, punctuated by the glitzy press event where the big media nibbled Chinese steaks and played with AR art installations in West Hollywood.

Spiegel has discovered a method to capitalize on its penchant for designing inspiring mobile products. With this strategy in place, Snap's redesigned Android app and the deployment of new languages, I think Snapchat will grow again, at least in terms of deeper engagement, or even total number of users. Perhaps he will need a little more funding to overcome it, but I think it will be profitable by the end of 2020.

At a press conference preceding the event with a dozen Snap leaders, including Spiegel and Murphy (it was about "the background", so we can not quote or clarify who said what), a higher joke from Snap that Facebook has copied it for seven years. years then it started to feel normal. Zuckerberg recently stated that he wanted to reorient Facebook in terms of privacy, ephemeral and messaging, Snapchat's fundamentals. But a Snap executive has used colorful language to describe how much they are mocking what Facebook says his philosophy is until it repairs the product to 2 billion users who continue to hurt.

Spiegel concludes: "Our camera lets the natural light of our world penetrate the darkness of the Internet. . . As we use the Internet more and more in our daily lives, we need a way to make it a little more humane. This apparently means that other apps need to be used a bit more by Snapchat.

[ad_2]

Source link