Most people who use Snapchat do so to chat with friends and exchange photos, almost completely ignoring the many other features, at least according to confidential internal data on the use of the app obtained by the US news site Daily Beast. The confirmation of the low user engagement adds new doubts about the future of Snapchat, seriously questioned in recent weeks by the main technology sites with articles and analysis on the poor progress achieved by the application, after the first years of great success. For Snap Inc., the company that owns Snapchat, poor user engagement is becoming a problem – uncertainties are impacting its stock less than a year after it enters the stock market.
In June of last year, Snapchat launched Snap Map in several countries, a service for sharing your location with friends in real time and seeing where they are on a map. The novelty had intrigued several users, leading to its daily use by about 30 million people. The spikes were mostly recorded on weekends, when you're more likely to hang out and hang out with your friends. However, the data obtained by Daily Beast show that already since the end of the summer things have changed: the use of Snap Map has increased to 19 million daily users, a small part of the approximately 178 million people who use Snapchat every day.
Things are no better for Discover, the section reserved for publishers to share their Stories and other content with commercial agreements with Snapchat. In the period between April and September, Discover attracted a maximum of 38 million daily users, about a fifth of all people who use the app. Other data, also published by Daily Beast, shows that Snapchat is above all successful in exchanging messages between groups of friends, therefore with the basic features that have practically always existed on the app.
Snap has always been very cautious in disseminating data on the use of its application, so probably also for this reason it has preferred not to comment on the publication of confidential information concerning it. Many of the additional features introduced by the company, such as Discovery, were designed to make the application more profitable and have spaces to show advertisements. The low revenues produced so far demonstrate the difficulties in making such a model fruitful, and the fact that users mostly use features where it is difficult to place advertising raises doubts about the economic potential of Snapchat.
In November 2017 Snap announced significant changes to the graphics and the way different sections of its application work, evidently with the aim of engaging users more and incentivising access to the most profitable sections. Despite the announcement, to date only a small percentage of subscribers have received the update and it is not clear when the news will be made available to everyone. The delay could indicate some further rethinking, but the uncertainty is not pleasing the shareholders. Snap's share value has gone from around $ 23 last May to $ 14 now.
