I think Snap is doing the best pure "Social Media" experience of any service right now. Whether or not that can really be monetized without becoming another Facebook is a different story.
When Instagram/Facebook quotes its numbers, they are worldwide user counts. Snapchat is mainly only used in US, UK, Canada, France, Germany which have around 600 million people. This compared to India, SE Asia, Brazil, Africa where Snapchat is virtually non-existant. Users in developed countries are 10 times more valuable based on ad dollars. Hence, I find the comparison of raw user numbers to be an unfair comparison.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/instagram-whatsapp-vs-snap...