Company Overview SnapChat is a photo messaging application (App) developed by Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy. Both of the founders were Stanford students. The application was initially developed for a project at Stanford. This app allows the user to share photos, videos, add text/drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. Users have the benefit of setting a time limit for how long the recipient can view their snaps (Ranging from 1 - 10 seconds), after which the photos/videos will be hidden from the recipient’s device and deleted from SnapChat’s servers. The smalltime college project developed into a huge social media success due to its innovative feature (Magid, 2013). SnapChat is one of the fastest growing social applications ever. For a relatively new company, which was founded in 2011, SnapChat has reached dizzying heights of social media traffic. The company at present shares a minimum of 400 million photos daily. This is even higher than the 350 million photo shared on Facebook daily. Due to the immense popularity the app enjoys, many companies target SnapChat to market their brands. This provides a major source of revenue for the company (Malukas, 2014). The company rose to fame in 2013 when Facebook offered to buy out SnapChat for a whopping $3 billion. But SnapChat declined the offer and the details were splashed around in online tabloids thereby elevating SnapChat’s brand name (Colao, 2014). The SnapChat brand logo is called Ghostface Chillah that was derived from a hip-hop group’s song Ghostface Killah. The core success for SnapChat cannot be explained easily. Many features of SnapChat exist in other similar applications, but the unique self-destructing pictures have been said to be the prime factor behind the phenomenal success of SnapChat. Recently in 2013, they launched a new feature called SnapKidz, which allowed kids to draw on the pictures they send to each other (Magid, 2013).
Secondary Research Since SnapChat
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