They say necessity is the mother of invention and, as we can see, this rule reached the world of mobile apps a long time ago as well. Snapchat has had its ups and downs over the years, but it managed to find its own niche. Instead of trying to become another Facebook, it focused on temporary content, spontaneity and things that were not meant to stay on the internet forever. That was enough for it to start stealing users from the biggest social media platforms.
At one point, Snapchat became interesting enough to attract the attention of Mark Zuckerberg himself. In 2013, Facebook was said to have offered around 3 billion dollars for the app. For most young creators, this would probably have been the kind of offer you simply do not turn down. Evan Spiegel and the other Snapchat co-founders, however, made a different decision.
At the time, many people considered that decision completely impossible to understand. A few years later, it looked very different. Snapchat kept attracting new investors, while its valuation was growing at an incredible pace. Alibaba was among the companies that invested in the app, and Snapchat’s value started to be counted in billions of dollars.
Interestingly, the best proof of Snapchat’s importance was not even the money, but the fact that competitors started copying its features. Disappearing messages, short-form content, stories available only for a limited time, today all of this sounds completely normal. Back then, it was something fresh.
What was the Snapchat phenomenon actually about?
The idea was extremely simple. You take a photo or record a short video, send it to a specific person, and after a few seconds the content disappears.
You did not have to wonder whether the photo looked good enough, whether it matched your profile or whether, five years later, you would still want to see it on your social media. Snapchat was supposed to be fast, imperfect and a little chaotic.
And that turned out to be its biggest advantage.
Facebook was becoming more and more like a place where you built your own public profile. Photos stayed there, posts could still be found years later, and your friend list increasingly included parents, teachers, extended family or co-workers.
Snapchat gave a completely different feeling. You could send a stupid photo to your friends and not worry that a few years later it would still be sitting somewhere on your profile.
Later came Stories, meaning content available for 24 hours. The idea turned out to be so good that today we can find a similar format almost everywhere.
Snapchat appealed mainly to younger users. For many teenagers, Facebook had simply become too formal and, perhaps even worse, full of adults.
Snapchat was more private, faster and less organised.
Evan Spiegel, a young billionaire with an idea
A story of a young Silicon Valley visionary quickly started to grow around Evan Spiegel. Comparisons with Mark Zuckerberg almost came naturally.
Both of them created platforms that understood very well how people wanted to communicate online. The difference was that Snapchat was already answering a slightly different need.
Facebook was saying: show your life.
Snapchat was more like: show what you are doing right now.
That difference may seem small, but in practice it completely changed the way people used the app.
The internet changes quickly and users can get bored very easily with yet another service that works exactly like all the others. Snapchat arrived with something that was simply missing at that moment.
It was not trying to store every memory. Quite the opposite, one of its biggest attractions was the fact that most things were supposed to disappear.
Snapchat quickly reached celebrities too
Wherever millions of young users appear, sooner or later influencers, brands and celebrities appear as well.
Snapchat was no different.
In Poland, the app became especially popular among YouTubers, fashion bloggers, models and musicians. Some of the most-followed people included Littlemooonster96, Maffashion, JDabrowsky, Banshee, Rezigiusz and Stuu.
Today, those numbers may not seem especially impressive, but at the time Snapchat was only starting to grow in Poland, and gaining more than one hundred thousand followers was a really strong result.
A similar trend could be seen abroad. Some of the biggest music and film stars were using the app. Snapchat was no longer just an app for sending funny photos to friends. It became another place where people could follow the lives of celebrities.
And that was also when the problems started to appear.
A disappearing photo does not mean a safe photo
Snapchat’s biggest advantage very quickly became its biggest risk at the same time.
If an app tells users that a photo they send will disappear in a moment, it is easy to start treating that kind of communication as more private than it really is.
This created ideal conditions for sexting, meaning sending sexual photos and messages.
The problem was especially serious because of the age of many Snapchat users. A huge part of the community consisted of teenagers who could assume that if a photo disappeared after a few seconds, it could not be saved or used later.
But the internet rarely works in such a convenient way.
Someone could take a screenshot, use another phone to photograph the screen or use additional apps that allowed them to save the content.
Snapchat therefore introduced notifications informing the sender when a screenshot had been taken. It was useful, but it did not solve the basic problem.
If something appeared on another person’s screen, it was no longer completely under our control.
That rule is still true regardless of the app.
The controversy was not only about privacy!
There were also growing questions around Snapchat about how the app itself had actually been created.
Frank Reginald Brown, one of the people involved in its early days, claimed that he had played a significant role in developing the idea, but had later been pushed out of the project. The case ended in a legal dispute and became another part of the less-than-perfect story of a young Silicon Valley start-up.
At the same time, questions were also being asked about the value of the company itself.
Could an app based mainly on photos disappearing after a few seconds really be worth more than ten billion dollars?
At the time, the answer was not obvious at all.
From today’s perspective, however, it is easy to see how much influence Snapchat had on the entire social media market. Stories, short vertical content, face filters and communication focused more on images than text later became standard.
Snapchat did not replace Facebook and it did not dominate the internet.
But it did something that may have been even more interesting.
It showed its competitors what the next stage of social media was going to look like.
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