How Snapchat Just Re-Discovered Itself

With Snapchat's acquisition of Vurb for $110 million it addresses its greatest weakness to become monetizable.

What Vurb does best is exactly what Snapchat is lacking — discovery.

In short, Snapchat is no longer the maverick GenZ new kid on the block of social media. In terms of engagement, few platforms have such scope to grow: 

The spiritual successor of Vine and a platform that arrived just when social media was declining in favor of SMS apps, Snapchat's rise over the last year has been impressive. 

Snapchat's a Big Kid Now 

We have to remember, 5 years ago, Snapchat was just a half baked idea of three Stanford University students in 2011. Fast forward to now, it's worth an estimated $20 billion, and it's hard to see Facebook Live, Periscope and Instagram stories comparing to it. 

What's the Vurb on the Street

Snapchat is mainstream now, with more daily users than Twitter and the only social app that has not seen a decrease in downloads and engagement, Vurb, is also 5 years old, but brings personal search discovery (an app), that stars in geo-targeting, such as info from sources like Yelp, Google Maps, Uber, etc...this kind of journey helps users plan an evening out all in one app. 

Therefore it makes sense that Snapchat is increasing its company size by more than 20% in New York, the capital of advertizing.  There are 9k snaps a second and as a pioneer in disappearing content, Snapchat blends social media and SMS in a useful way that leverages video content better than any other platform. 

Millennial Channels that Monetize 

With over 70% of Snapchat's users being Millennials, you might say it's a GenZ channel that's now being adopted by Millennials. How much more mainstream it will become is hard to say, but it's growing at a very impressive rate. 

Vurb's ability to power discovery should give Snapchat a boost, as well as additional talent. Being able to surface accounts worth following and geo-targeting search is key for Snapchat's ability to be monetizable. In an age of acquisitions, this is a smart one highlighting Snapchat's new found maturity. 

With 22% of ad execs planning to advertize on Snapchat this year, Snapchat has hit prime time. 

Snapchat's stories beat out Facebook at their own game, emerging in the realm of YouTube and Facebook for video creations. From May 2015 to May 2016, Snapchat's daily video views increased over 400%, and is on track to do 18 billion daily video views by May 2017. That's insane growth, and as an alternative to Facebook, consumers are showing a preference for the next thing. 

On Design Interfaces & In-app Integrations

Many industry analysts believe Vurb will allow Snapchat to improve its interface to be easier to use for mainstream adoption. Snapchat's baffling interface made sense when it was a hidden app for kids, but perhaps no longer. While retention is high among peer groups, for the professional adult an easier interface and learning curve would increase app retention. 

Vurb also gives Snapchat valuable integration to ride-share hailing and the ability to pull ratings from Foursquare and Yelp to enable experience planning. That it can pull info from IMDB and other movie review sites is just a bonus. 

Do you think Snapchat will continue to grow and engage users beating out rivals such as Instagram, Facebook and others?