I don't follow your logic about SnapChat not having been a magic trick; it was just messages that vanished! You claim they were defensible but they seem largely irrelevant today.
About your assessment that AI hasn't freed up any new land yet: I think that sadly it might be stealing time that people used spend interacting with other people, even digitally.
Snapchat was able to build direct network effect that gave them good defensibility. The company has almost 500 million DAU despite incredible effort by companies like Meta to crush them.
That hasn't translated into an impressive market cap because their core engagement loop is not super monetizable. Direct network effect products rarely are (see Whatsapp). Most have to sequence to cross-side network effects (creator / consumer) and data network effects (personalized feeds). Snapchat sequenced to other products that gave them more traditional slots for ad inventory and did build out a creator economy, but it's still lacking enough high quality impressions to monetize ads like Google and Meta, and consumer subscription products are hard to scale monetization for.
I cover this element in more depth with Snapchat here: https://www.caseyaccidental.com/p/second-products (obviously the market caps for all companies have been very volatile since posting those tables)
AI won’t mint a new TikTok until it discovers truly new land to build on, not just better tricks on the old map.
I don't follow your logic about SnapChat not having been a magic trick; it was just messages that vanished! You claim they were defensible but they seem largely irrelevant today.
About your assessment that AI hasn't freed up any new land yet: I think that sadly it might be stealing time that people used spend interacting with other people, even digitally.
Snapchat was able to build direct network effect that gave them good defensibility. The company has almost 500 million DAU despite incredible effort by companies like Meta to crush them.
That hasn't translated into an impressive market cap because their core engagement loop is not super monetizable. Direct network effect products rarely are (see Whatsapp). Most have to sequence to cross-side network effects (creator / consumer) and data network effects (personalized feeds). Snapchat sequenced to other products that gave them more traditional slots for ad inventory and did build out a creator economy, but it's still lacking enough high quality impressions to monetize ads like Google and Meta, and consumer subscription products are hard to scale monetization for.
I cover this element in more depth with Snapchat here: https://www.caseyaccidental.com/p/second-products (obviously the market caps for all companies have been very volatile since posting those tables)
AI won’t mint a new TikTok until it discovers truly new land to build on, not just better tricks on the old map.