Social media has been a staple in American culture since the early 2000s. It has shaped social interaction, and presents platforms that allow people to be connected in ways that were unachievable before. As social media has grown more and more popular, the business side of social media has generated major revenue. Between ads and paid features, apps like Snapchat and Twitter make over $350 million each year. Snapchat is an interesting case. Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat’s rivals, have been publically traded since 2012-2013, while Snapchat has become publically traded recently, since March 2, 2017. With Snapchat joining Twitter and Facebook on the stock market, let’s examine what this means.

This is the perfect time for Snapchat to go public. 158 million people use Snapchat on a daily basis, which was the population of Bangladesh in 2008. On average, the app gets opened a whopping 18 times a day, with users spending 25-30 minutes a day on it, according to Snap, Inc. This mass of users is apparent everywhere, especially in our high school setting, where many of my peers have an account. As expected, 158 daily users, along with the more casual users, generate a massive amount of revenue, $404.4 million in 2016 to be exact. Snap, Inc., the company under which Snapchat is run under, will base its stocks off its two sources of income, Snapchat and Spectacles.

We can learn a lot from Snapchat’s competitors. In its beginning stages, the stock of Snap, Inc. has both soared and crashed down, making predicting its future hard to predict. After 3 months of being publicly traded, Facebook’s stock fell 50%, but 6 months later (9 months after first being publicly traded), Facebook’s stock rose 250% and is currently regarded as a leading tech stock. Twitter’s stock rose 60% after it debuted on the stock market, but has fallen by 60% to date as it has failed to produce its expected level of revenue and user growth. Snapchat’s stock rose 40% after its debut, and its future can either blossom similarly to Facebook, or crash similarly to Twitter. acebook rose due to a mature platform and ad revenue. Twitter failed because of a lack of user growth and revenue. If Snap, Inc. can generate revenue and user growth, their stocks will soar.

Snapchat has come a long way since its inception. It has increased advertising aggressively, and began to sell Spectacles, which are glasses that take photos and record videos from a first person perspective. However, Snap will need to figure out more ways to increase their market and generate more revenue, so it reaches outside of the millennial demographic which can only help them economically to a certain extent. In order for its revenue to grow from less than $1 billion yearly, Snap will need to connect to a more mature user base, generate more ad revenue, and create new products. As of writing this, Snap’s stock price stands at $22.22, and for its first year of trading, Snap, Inc. should stay around this, probably going up to around $24 per share.