Much has happened since I last wrote a piece here.
I started working at Intercom in a challenging Sales Ops role. It’s been a whirlwind, and I love working there. We have a world-class blog and podcast that you all should read and listen to if you don’t already.
But now I’m back to thinking and writing critically about the important things happening in the tech world.
I first mentioned Instagram in this post from January. At that time, Snap was two months away from their IPO and one month away from filing their S1. I wrote, in more or less certain terms, that Snap was in trouble because a) Instagram Stories were crushing it and b) brands weren’t getting effective results from their ads on Snap.
These two trends have continued seemingly unabated.
I also noted that Snap’s confusing design was going to be a hindrance to more people using it. Sure enough, Snap announced a redesign of their app to make more clear the separation of content from friends and content from publishers.
We’ve also since learned that it’s not actually Snap’s core messages business that is the issue. The Daily Beast published an article yesterday with leaked numbers from a five-month period in 2017. During the time in question, daily messages sent on Snapchat actually rose from 80 to 87 million, which is a >20% annualized growth rate. That’s not bad. However, Snap’s other products saw flat to declining usage over the same time period.
At this point, Snap is the owner of a very popular chat app with millions of young users who each send hundreds of image-data-rich messages every day. Without a separate source of concrete data about its users, I don’t see a clear path to monetization.
However, 2017, to me, was less about Snap failing to execute and more about Instagram executing at the absolute highest level. 2017 saw Instagram become the most relevant social network outside of China.
Instagram has become the best tool to build a brand, ever. People who are champions of a brand not only get targeted ads from that brand directly in their feed, they actively sculpt and tailor their accounts into the hyper-realized version of that brand’s vision. On top of that, Instagram feeds these images back to its users in a cycle of self-perfection and realization.
It’s as if a brand held a focus session for a new product, and each of the participants, regardless of whether she truly liked the product, changed her opinion to suit the product, and then went out of her way to purchase that product and modify her life to include more of it.
I speak in extremes not for gratuitous effect but to try and illustrate just how effective this platform is. We’ve never seen anything that links aspirations, products, and people so effectively.
A vibrant Instagram has become the ultimate consumer accessory.
I don’t think this is a good or healthy thing.
Two major shareholders of Apple recently pushed for the company to create greater controls for parents over their children’s device usage. They did this out of concern that these devices have created a rapidly worsening health crisis of addiction to electronic devices.
I think that 2018 will see more of this – the largest tech companies struggling to grapple with the adverse side effects that their products have on consumers. 2018 for me will see me writing shorter posts more frequently.
In the words of Scott Galloway –
Life is so rich –
-BPD
Notes:
- Intercom website: www.intercom.com
- Intercom Blog: blog.intercom.com
- Intercom Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inside-intercom-podcast/id996103731?mt=2
- Instagram and Snapchat: https://benpdavis.com/2017/01/30/instagram-vs-snapchat/
- The Verge – Instagram Stories is now more popular than the app it was designed to kill: https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/13/15279266/instagram-stories-facebook-200-million-users-snapchat-clone
- CNN – Snapchat redesign: http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/29/technology/snapchat-redesign/index.html
- Daily Beast – This is the Data Snapchat Doesn’t Want You to See: https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-the-data-snapchat-doesnt-want-you-to-see?via=twitter_page
- Jana/Calpers Push Apple to Study iPhone Addiction in Children: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-08/jana-calpers-push-apple-to-study-iphone-addiction-in-children
Ben Davis 
Your statement “…they actively sculpt and tailor their accounts” correctly sums up the appeal. User self select their content and define their feeds. With excessive assault on our in boxes, etc the fine tuning of our interests and subsequent communications is the greatest asset. Likewise, the ability to deselect and actually be deselected runs concurrent with that.
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Fantastic post Ben. I’m excited to see how FAANG and other influential companies will balance expectations of continued fast paced earnings growth with long-term customer retention and the health of their users.
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