Hacker News Reader

Comment by hullo | Hacker News Reader

Well, they're not talking about leaving a million on the table, they're talking about leaving a million and a half on the table every single day ("if only they'd use our product!"). The figure they come up with is a half a billion dollars, which is a much larger number than you're giving credit to here.

View on HN

That's assuming not-wildly-optimistic assumptions within a self-serving analysis. Dial that back to $100M rather than half a billion, and it's no longer a tremendously appealing option.

Facebook's per-user revenue for US users was $4.19 as of last October (with far smaller amounts for non-US users). And that's with years of experience, rich targeting based on multi-year social data mining, and the ability to embed several ad impressions per pageview. Is Snapchat likely to hit that high mark? Not in the short term, for sure.

> Facebook's per-user revenue for US users was $4.19 as of last October

Revenue per user over what time period?

That's over one quarter.

The data is from their 10-Q: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/2956973952...

$832MM revenue from US & Canada, with 199 million users = $4.18

As a comparison, that's half of Twitter's current annual revenue.

And Twitter is unprofitable.

Apparently Snapchat's costs are incredibly low though. At the very least, their employee count is 2 digits, not 4.

That won't last once they're monetizing. They'll have to staff up a great deal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com