I hate to admit that as a single 20-something millennial, I have voluntarily enlisted myself in the dark, dark world of online dating. The other day, I was swiping away and one of the guys I matched with reached out to me, asking if we could connect on Snapchat. I scoffed and unmatched as quickly as my fingers would go. What kind of respectable 20-something year old would utilize the app of Gen-Z(ers)? But then I got to thinking — what actually happened to Snapchat?

I pulled some numbers and found that according to businessofapps.com, Snapchat had a total of 293 million users and has only grown to 314.6 million users in 2020. These are still outstanding numbers, but according to statista.com, Instagram hit 1 billion global users in June 2018. LinkedIn has 760 million users, Twitter has 330 million users and Facebook has a whopping 2.7 billion users.

What’s really incredible to me is that each of these other social media platforms has completely adopted the principal Snapchat was founded on — the disappearing 24-hour story. It has become a full-on marketing strategy to promote your product or blog.

Yet, even though Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel came up with this amazing idea that all other social media platforms have essentially copied, Snapchat seems to be a dwindling platform.

It reminds me a bit of Microsoft’s Zune, the mp3 player that was the competitor to Apple’s iPod. Zune was one of the first to implement the idea of a subscription service where, for a monthly fee, you could access a full library of music. However, Spotify and later Apple began offering that same service and Microsoft has since discontinued Zune and their services.

So my question is — how is it that an idea so powerful lives on, but the business model does not?

I think for Snapchat, while the competition was tough, there was certainly a time that it made a large impact. I’ve since downloaded Snapchat to study the app a bit further and see what services they offer and my conclusion is exactly that: they don’t offer any services beyond the disappearing story. As users, we stay on Facebook because it has grown with us. We have moved past our high school connections and college professors, and now we can be part of groups. There’s pretty much a group for anything that you could possibly be interested in. Facebook also has their messenger service which is a great way to have group chats with people who (beyond my understanding) don’t use Apple’s iMessage. LinkedIn has an entire professional network with easy access to job applications and what seems to be, really wonderful courses for the professional. Instagram is great for creatives and small businesses and is also now offering shopping capabilities straight from a photo. But while all the other apps continued to evolve with their users’ demands, Snapchat had not been able to offer any more services beyond the disappearing story. They (Snapchat) later tried to add news stories as well but weren’t able to keep the user as engaged as they once were.

With new apps constantly being created, people move on from things very quickly and are always looking forward to their next experience. Sometimes having the right timing is key, and I wonder if Snapchat just didn’t know when to implement the features their users were looking for. It’ll be interesting to see if Snapchat can keep up with the rapid pace of the tech industry and give its users the experience they’re looking for.