Why is Snapchat launching on desktop? 🤯
Customer behaviour, revenue per user & more.
Welcome to the 105th edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 94,400+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
After 11 years of it’s existence, it decides to go the Desktop universe.
Snapchat has a good news & a bad metric 🗓
It’s revenue for the last 12 months ending September was $4.6 Billion, a 23.31% increase year-over-year. It’s Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) touched $4.06. This is the most the company has made of a user since its launch in 2011. In comparison, TikTok made $46 & META made $41 per user. That’s 10X difference.
It’s user base is getting older 💡
When Snapchat started, it’s majority user base was “teens”, in other words 13 to 17 year olds. Fast forward almost a decade 80% of it’s user base is 18+ year old & 40% of overall base is 25+ year old. Data Source
Plus, age Vs device choices is a evergreen insight 📱
Most teens had access to Snapchat through smartphones and a decade later, most of them have access to a desktop / laptop device. Ask yourself, how many of your current apps you use on both mobile & laptop devices? For me, it’s almost most of the apps - Instagram, WhatsApp, Gmail, Slack, LinkedIn, Google Photos & banking apps.
On the other hand, Snapchat’s struggle with ARPU is real 💰
And it has tried a lot of experiments. Especially, by solving for average sessions per user & average time a user spends on the app every day. But, mobile only experience is restrictive.
Snapchat’s key monetizable products are Sponsored Lenses, 3D video overlays (AR) & mobile video advertising service Snap Ads. Given that all of these products require a high speed internet & bandwidth - most of Snap’s revenue is currently limited to developed mobile markets.
That’s why the Snapchat desktop journey 💻
First, it solves for the ageing user base device choices.
Second, it allows them to service desktop advertising with higher CPMs.
Third, it opens up large screen experiences, especially for video.
If I were to be brutal on this assessment, Snap is pretty late to the party on desktop experiences & it will have it’s own set of challenges across cross device experiences, data infrastructure & more importantly - adoption. But, time will tell how Snap users take this experiment.
Most social media apps struggle to monetise 💸
When the user is not the end customer but the advertiser, it gets tricky to solve for making money just from ads. That’s why we built an in-depth monetisation framework that helps you design either ad-monetisation, subscription or transactional based monetisation strategy for your on product. Checkout the detailed experience curriculum to get a snippet view if you are struggling with revenue growth for your ad-monetisation based model.
Did this issue add value to your thought process?
We recently hit a new milestone of 35,000 active readers of this newsletter just like you. We will keep raising the bar of our writing & we need your help. Share this newsletter with your colleagues who solve for revenue growth in your company. They will appreciate it, I promise ✨
Are you struggling to become a revenue growth leader?
GrowthX is the community for top 1% growth leaders. All of them started like a newsletter reader just like you. All they did was to take action & jump into the GrowthX tribe. This week, we are hosting a fireside chat with some of the leaders at GrowthX in a curated setting. They’ll share stories from their GX journey, unfiltered and LIVE.