Only 300 teenage respondents? That's not enough to ensure such a conclusion, especially when considering percentages of the whole.
According to the raw data download, there are 365 data points, but 104 answered "I don't use any of these" which are stated to be excluded, so the actual amount of teenage respondents is 261?
Hi Max,
Survata co-founder here. The 365 respondents were used as the denominator for calculating the % of teens that use a service (like Snapchat) regularly. So that's the sample size for the first chart shown in the link. (The margin of error on 365 respondents is about 5%).
Naturally, we had to exclude the respondents who used no social services from the questions that asked about their favorite social service, like the second chart shown in the link.
How does 365 data points give your conclusions any sort of statistical significance? Snapchat's numbers are allegedly over 30M, Facebook's are over 1.2B and Instagram's are 150M.
Edit: I guess that sounded a little harsh. No doubt, Snapchat's growth has been explosive and if this was just another blog-spam post about that fact, I'd let it be. But you're selling a statistical software! I'd expect better from people who know what they're doing. Also, "How to Lie with Statistics" is a really good book, should be required reading for anyone dealing with numbers. Did not mean that as an attack on your product.
Gallup's daily tracking polls, which offer a +-4% margin of error, are based of 1000 data points (insert complaint about appeal to authority here). While 365 is significantly lower than that, there is nothing wrong with using the data to produce a value and a margin of error/confidence.
Assuming the respondents are uniformly randomly chosen, it takes surprisingly few people to get a pretty high confidence interval. I'm not convinced that the respondents are uniform, but I expect that there is a sufficient distribution that the results are still interesting. 3x vs. 1.5x seems like a small difference to me, but I am not an investor or user, so....
Nevermind teens. I'm 42. I use it with my adult siblings, cousins and friends. It's a delightful way to stay in touch. Sometimes it's a picture of my breakfast, or the weather outside, or our pets, or whatever other amusing moment is going on in our day that we'd laugh about if we were together. The ephemeral nature of the pictures and the ability to scribble on them is just delightful fun.
This is exactly what makes Snapchat fun and addictive. It takes all the friction out of taking photos and boils it right down. With Instagram, you spend a lot of time taking the right photo, the right lighting, the right filter, the right caption, etc. All of this is gone with Snapchat, because you know it'll be gone. People are happy to share slightly embarrassing stuff, like a mouthful of burger or no makeup.
Selecting who receives is easier, too, because you can uncheck some people. Instagram doesn't have that option, I'd need to create a new list with Facebook, and group texting is a lot more work.
I agree with all your points re: taking the friction out of the equation. However, I think it's more to do with the fact that you share with individuals rather than to a feed that makes the difference. Not so much the fact that it will sort of vanish after it gets viewed (less so now that they can get replayed)
When you share to a feed you'e sending it out for everyone to see. You want to know that people saw it and with services like Instagram and Facebook this is done via commenting and Liking/Favoriting.
With Snapchat you fire and forget. No one needs to like the picture in order for you to feel any sort of satisfaction. The only indicator you get is that it was viewed at all - and with the sort of content that gets sent over Snapchat, that's really all the information you need anyways.
TL;DR: I think the "choose indiciduals to send to" model is more important than the "they get erased" aspect. Of course, the vanishing part of it is what got Snapchat to become popular in the first place so it would be wrong to say they would have seen the same amount of success without that feature. However, at this point, I don't think that is what makes users keep using the service.
I've found Wickr to be more secure and comes from a company that really seems to care about users. Where Snapchat is an illusion of ephemeral messaging, Wickr is the real deal.
What's more appealing, a socially acceptable method for your girlfriend to send nude photos of herself to your phone that are then removed (allegedly).
OR Facebook, which is just reaching popularity with your parents...
Considering that all un-viewed Snapchat's have to be stored, there's no need for a secret db. I've heard a rumor that snaps are stored in memecache and they are running in to scaling pains with the amount of un-viewed pictures stored in memory.
usernames & pws have to be stored of course... but I though the whole appeal of snapchat was that messages would self-destruct? i.e. communication between users is not permanent? (except in the brains of the sender and recipient, i.e. just like human oral communication)
According to the raw data download, there are 365 data points, but 104 answered "I don't use any of these" which are stated to be excluded, so the actual amount of teenage respondents is 261?