Snap Stock

Snap Inc. operates as a technology company.

The company’s flagship product, Snapchat, is a visual messaging application that enhances relationships with friends, family, and the world. Visual messaging is a fast, fun way to communicate with friends and family using augmented reality, video, voice, messaging, and creative tools. Snaps are deleted by default to mimic real-life conversations, so there is less pressure to look popular or perfect when creating and sending images on Snapchat. By reducing the friction typically associated with creating and sharing content, Snapchat has become one of the most used cameras in the world.

Snapchat

Snapchat is the company’s core mobile device application and contains five distinct tabs, complemented by additional tools that function outside of the application. With a breadth of visual messaging and content experiences available within the application, Snapchatters can interact with any or all of the five tabs.

Camera: The Camera is a powerful tool for communication and the entry point for augmented reality experiences in Snapchat. Snapchat opens directly to the Camera, making it easy to create a Snap and send it to friends. The company’s augmented reality, or AR, capabilities within its Camera allow for creativity and self-expression. The company offers millions of Lenses, created by both the company and its community, along with creative tools and licensed music and audio clips, which make it easy for people to personalize and contextualize their Snaps. The company also offers voice and scanning technology within its Camera. While Snaps are deleted by default to mimic real-life conversations, users can save their creativity through a searchable collection of Memories stored on both their Snapchat account and their mobile device. A user can also create Snaps on its wearable devices, Spectacles. Spectacles connect seamlessly with Snapchat and capture photos and video from a human perspective. The company’s latest version of Spectacles, designed for creators, overlays AR Lenses directly onto the world.

Visual Messaging: Visual Messaging is a fast, fun way to communicate with friends and family using augmented reality, video, voice, messaging, and creative tools. The company also offers My AI, its AI-powered chatbot, which helps its community foster creativity and connection with friends, receive real-world recommendations, and learn more about their interests and favorite subjects. They can also communicate through its proprietary personalized avatar tool, Bitmoji, and its associated contextual stickers and images, which integrate seamlessly into both mobile devices and desktop browsers.

Snap Map: Snap Map is a live and highly personalized map that allows Snapchatters to connect with friends and explore what is going on in their local area. Snap Map makes it easy to locate nearby friends who choose to share their location, view a heatmap of recent Snaps posted to Our Story by location, and locate local businesses. Places, rich profiles of local businesses that include information, such as store hours and reviews, overlay specialized experiences from select partners on top of Snap Map, and allow Snapchatters to take direct actions from Snap Map, such as sharing a favorite store, ordering takeout, or making a reservation.

Stories: Stories are a fun way to stay connected with people care most about. Stories feature content from a Snapchatter’s friends, its community, and its content partners. Friends Stories allow its community to express themselves in narrative form through photos and videos, shown in chronological order, to their friends. The Discover section of this tab displays curated content based on a Snapchatter’s subscriptions and interests, and features news and entertainment from both its creator community and publisher partners. The company also offers Public Profiles, as a way for its creator community and its advertising partners to memorialize and scale their content and AR Lenses on its platform.

Spotlight: Spotlight showcases the best of Snapchat, helping people discover new creators and content in a personalized way. Here the company surfaces the most entertaining Snaps from its community all in one place, which becomes tailored to each Snapchatter over time based on their preferences and favorites. The Trending page allows Snapchatters to discover and engage with popular topics and genres.

Additionally, the company offers Snapchat+, its subscription product that provides subscribers access to exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features. Snapchat+ offers a variety of features from allowing Snapchatters to customize the look and feel of their app, to giving special insights into their friendships. The company also offers Snapchat for Web, a browser-based product that brings Snapchat’s signature capabilities to the web.

Partner Ecosystem

Many elements and features of Snapchat are enhanced by the company’s expansive partner ecosystem that includes developers, creators, publishers, and advertisers, among others. The company helps them create and bring diverse content and experiences into Snapchat, leverage Snapchat capabilities in their own applications and websites, and uses advertising to promote these and other experiences to its large, engaged, and differentiated user base. The company seeks to reward its partner ecosystem for their creativity, and continue to support them as they grow their audience and build their business on Snapchat.

Developers are able to integrate with Snapchat and its core technologies, like Snap’s AR Camera and Bitmoji, through a variety of tools. Creative Kit gives developers and their communities a seamless sharing experience from their app directly to Snapchat. Through Camera Kit, its partners can embed Snap’s AR platform directly into their application, extending the use of AR beyond self-expression and communication use cases. The company also provides developers a turnkey suite of tools and services that enable them to create AR Lenses and track the performance of those through analytics. Finally, developers can bring an inclusive mode of identity and expression to their apps and games with its Bitmoji for Developers APIs and SDKs.

AR creators can use Lens Studio, the company’s powerful desktop application designed for creators and developers, to build augmented reality experiences for Snapchatters. Spotlight creators can utilize its content creation tools to reach millions of Snapchatters and build their businesses through various monetization opportunities. The company’s Creator Marketplace connects both AR and Spotlight creators directly with its advertising partners. The company provides monetizable opportunities through programs like the Snap Lens Network and Ghost, which provide grants to support AR product development across many industries. The company also supports its content creator community through a number of programs, including advertising revenue sharing on its mid-roll advertisements in Snap Stars’ Stories.

Publisher partners can expand their audiences and monetize content through its Discover platform. In addition, the company works with various telecommunications providers and original equipment manufacturers, particularly as it builds presence in new markets.

Advertising Products

The company connects both brand and direct response advertisers to Snapchatters globally. The company’s ad products are built on the same foundation that makes its consumer products successful. This means that it can take the things the company learns while creating its consumer products and apply them to building innovative and engaging advertising products familiar to its community.

AR Ads: Advertising through Snap’s AR tools unlocks the ability to reach a unique audience in a highly differentiated way through AR Lenses. AR Lenses are designed through the company’s camera to take advantage of the reach and scale of its augmented reality platform to create visually engaging 3D experiences, including the ability to visualize and try on products such as beauty, apparel, accessories, and footwear. AR Lenses can be memorialized on Snapchat, through Public Profiles that aggregate content and lenses in a single, easy to find place.

Snap Ads: The company lets advertisers tell their stories the same way its users do, using full screen videos with sound. These also allow advertisers to integrate additional experiences and actions directly within these advertisements, including watching a long-form video, visiting a website, or installing an app. Snap Ads include the following:

Single Image or Video Ads: These are full screen ads that are skippable, and can contain an attachment to enable Snapchatters to swipe up and take action.

Story Ads: Story Ads are branded tiles that live within the Discover section of the Stories tab that can be either video ads or a series of 3 to 20 images.

Collection Ads: Collection Ads feature four tappable tiles to showcase multiple products, giving Snapchatters a frictionless way to browse and buy.

Dynamic Ads: Dynamic ads leverage its machine learning algorithm to match a product catalog to serve the right ad to the right Snapchatter at the right time.

Commercials: Commercials are non-skippable for six seconds, but can last up to three minutes. These ads appear within Snapchat’s curated content.

Campaign Management and Delivery: The company has invested heavily to build its self-serve advertising platform, which provides automated, sophisticated, and scalable ad buying and campaign management.

The company offers the ability to bid for advertisements that are designated to drive Snapchatters to: visit a website, make a purchase, visit a local business, call or text a business, watch a story or video, download an app, or return to an app, among others. Additionally, the company’s delivery framework continues to optimize relevance of ads across the entire platform by determining the best ad to show to any given user based on their real-time and historical attributes and activity. This decreases the number of wasted impressions while improving the effectiveness of the ads that are shown to its community. This helps advertisers increase their return on investment by providing more refined targeting, the ability to test and learn with different creatives or campaign attributes in real time, and the dynamics of its self-serve pricing.

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness: The company offers first-party measurement solutions and it supports its advertising partners preferred third-party measurement solutions to provide a vast array of analytics on campaign attributes like reach, frequency, demographics, and viewability; changes in perceptions like brand favorability or purchase intent; and lifts in actual behavior like purchases, foot traffic, app installs, and online purchases.

Technology

The company’s research and development efforts focus on product development, advertising technology, and large-scale infrastructure.

Product Development: The company works relentlessly and invest deliberately to create and improve products for its community and its partners. The company develops a wide range of products related to visual messaging and storytelling that are powered by a variety of new technologies.

Advertising Technology: The company constantly develops and expands its advertising products and technology.

Large-scale Infrastructure: The company spends considerable resources and investment on the underlying architecture that powers its products, such as optimizing the delivery of billions of videos to hundreds of millions of people around the world every day. The company partners with third party providers to support the infrastructure for its growing needs.

Competition

The company competes with other companies in every aspect of its business, particularly with companies that focus on mobile engagement and advertising. Many of these companies, such as Alphabet (including Google and YouTube), Apple, ByteDance (including TikTok), Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp), Pinterest, and X. The company faces competition from companies like Kakao, LINE, Naver (including Snow), and Tencent in Asia.

Seasonality

The company has historically seen seasonality in its business. Overall advertising spend tends to be strongest in the fourth quarter of the calendar year (year ended December 31, 2023), and the company has observed a similar pattern in its historical revenue. The company has also experienced seasonality in its user engagement, generally seeing lower engagement during summer months and higher engagement in December.

Intellectual Property

As of December 31, 2023, the company had approximately 3,174 issued patents and approximately 3,111 filed patent applications in the United States and foreign countries relating to its camera platform and other technologies. The company’s issued patents will expire between 2024 and 2047.

Government Regulation

In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission resolved an investigation into some of the company’s early practices by handing down a final order. That order requires, among other things, that the company establishes a robust privacy program to govern how it treats user data. In June 2014, the company entered into a 10-year assurance of discontinuance with the Attorney General of Maryland implementing similar practices, including measures to prevent minors from creating accounts and providing annual compliance reports.

History

The company was founded in 2010. The company was incorporated in 2012. It was formerly known as Snapchat, Inc. and changed its name to Snap Inc. in 2016.