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Comment by kneel | Hacker News Reader

Their demograph is just graduating high school. They will be very valuable in the future.

Isn't this what people said about Facebook when they were at this stage?

I feel as though that has failed to materialize, and their new demographic is "relatives over 50 desperate to appear 'hip'"

I'm wondering if it's a coincidence that facebook's revenue was 18 billion last year...

More and more it seems the entire excersize is just elaborate cover for Evan and Mark to have a dick measuring contest.

Evan: "I'm coming for you, you know you'll have to buy it all sooner or later, try not to insult me with your next offer!"

Zuck: "In your dreams kid!"

That's an interesting interpretation.

I think Zuckerberg is extremely paranoid about Facebook being displaced. Facebook knocked MySpace off the throne, and everyone predicted Facebook would suffer the same fate. It hasn't happened because Zuckerberg has been strategically paranoid.

Even after getting a slow start in mobile, he threw ridiculous amounts of money at the situation until they were back on top.

I think the present-day VR hype is due to Zuckerberg being paranoid that VR would be the next mobile, and wanting to get ahead of it. Everyone followed his lead and people are betting the farm on VR being the next big thing, when that's just not clear at all. But for Facebook, spending $2B on Oculus was an ounce-of-prevention purchase.

Zuck tried to do the same with Snapchat a long time (2012 or 2013?) ago but most accounts of the situation have Evan scoffing at the $3 billion offer.

Surely he (Zuck) will run out of cash and stock with which to make $20 billion dollar acquisitions sooner rather than later?

People did say that and they were right. Facebook is currently valued at over $300 billion.

foolishly tho; they have 4B profit on 18B revenue, pretty short of 300B

It's an investor's job to be so foolish.

their P/E ratio is huge, they are not worthless just overvalued

I'm not a fan of Facebook, and I think their core product is fundamentally antisocial and creepy. That said, the company is hugely successful. There's no denying it.

While Facebook may be less hip than it once was, the company now owns mobile (Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp). They would have loved to had Snapchat too.

Small bit if anecdata. My Niece graduated high school last year started UCLA and promptly switched to Facebook.

...assuming they are able to retain these users. I am not entirely optimistic that Snapchat will manage to hold on to their users in the long term.

It seems popular with that demographic. It came out when I was like 20 or 21. I was never really into it. My peers were, but it just seemed silly to me.

Just like MySpace users are very valuable now. Oh, wait.

People growing up will not be using Snapchat, for the exact reason you stated.

Well, Mark Suster and Justin Kan are just two examples of gorwnups using Snapchat successfully for video blogging.

They're using it as a business, not what the other 99.9% of people are using it for.

There's a chance then that more people will be using it for that purpose targeting wider audience.

Sure, but the point here is, that is relies on a young user base. They are widely known as having zero loyalty, and will drop and move on to the next big thing on a whim.

So that's the whole thing ? cultural stockholm syndrom ?

Yes, and revenue based in online advertising, which is itself mostly fraud and lies bound to collapse on itself sooner or later.

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