Snapchat has hit a growth plateau. The company does not seem to be thriving as much as we all had anticipated a few years ago. This is probably due to the fact that its most unique value proposition of 10-second stories has been shamelessly copied by Facebook. Facebook not just introduced Stories in their Messenger app but also incorporated it in Instagram and WhatsApp. And now it has come to light that the stories feature in WhatsApp, called the WhatsApp Status, has reached 250 million monthly users surpassing Snapchat who according to their last released stats has only 166 million active users.
Introducing the Stories feature on all of its owned platforms was a gamble by Facebook to grow its business. A move which was widely scrutinized has now proven to be quite successful as WhatsApp Status and Instagram Stories both have over 250 Million monthly users despite the fact that stories are not their main feature. Furthermore, WhatsApp now has over 1 billion daily users and 1.3 billion monthly active users.
Earlier today, Facebook made public their earnings for the second quarter of 2017. The company made a revenue of $9.32 billion despite a slower user growth. Their revenue was 44.7% year-over-year as compared to 59 percent in Q2 2016. This is quite a clear indication that Facebook’s revenue growth is slowing down and they are finding alternate means to increase their income. The company recently announced that they will start stuffing ads in Messenger as they have completely ran out of space in their News Feed. And now with people over 1 billion people on WhatsApp it seems likely that the social media giant would want to push ads there as well.
As Facebook continues to find multiple sources of revenue, Snapchat appears to have it a dead end. The company isn’t showing any creativity in terms of introducing new features or alternate revenue sources. If steps aren’t taken to increase their growth, Snapchat could soon find itself completely isolated or gone for good.
