Could Twitter be spooked by the news that Snapchat has overtaken it in terms of daily usage?
Messaging app Snapchat has reportedly surpassed Twitter in daily usage figures for the first time.
Twitter, which seems to lurch from one crisis to another these days, will hardly be chirpy about the latest development.
According to Bloomberg, Snapchat has 150m users every day, according to sources close to the company.
This is greater than Twitter, which has less than 140m daily users.
This suggests that Snapchat’s user base has grown 35pc in three months, while Twitter said in its most recent earnings report that its user base has grown just 3pc.
Snapping at the heels of social media
The latest indication may be spooking Twitter but Snapchat still has some way to go to catch up with Facebook, which has more than 1bn daily users.
Snapchat, which was founded only four years ago, last week raised $1.8bn in a gigantic funding round, valuing the company at $18bn, even though it currently brings in just $60m in revenues from advertising.
A report at the time from TechCrunch signalled that Snapchat’s user figures had risen steadily from 50m in March 2014 to 110m over Christmas.
The company was founded in Stanford University by Evan Spiegel, Bobbie Murphy and Reggie Brown while they were students.
Snapchat began under the name Picaboo, inspired by the concept of messages that would disappear, and hence the ghost logo for the company.
A bitter dispute over Brown’s role in co-founding the company was settled, crediting Brown with a role in conceiving the idea.
Snapchat’s whole concept is in the name, with it allowing people to send annotated selfies and short videos that disappear after a short time, turning communication into a kind of game where users can achieve a“Snapstreak”. Last year, Snapchat branched into the world of news and Live Stories.
Ghost image via Shutterstock
