Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2013; the figures it cites for Snapchat (400 million snaps a day), Facebook (about 1.1 billion users, 350 million photo uploads a day) and Instagram (150 million users) are from that time. Google+ was shut down for consumers in 2019.
Snapchat now shares 400 million snaps a day, according to its CEO, Evan Spiegel, as reported by TechCrunch. The growth in these disappearing photos is astonishing, considering that Facebook, with around 1.1 billion users, reports 350 million photos uploaded to the social network, while Instagram’s 150 million users upload about 50 million photos a day.
Of course, the key to understanding how important these numbers are lies not in photo uploads but in photo views, because Snapchat works privately. Each photo is seen by only one person before it self-destructs, whereas photos uploaded to Instagram and/or Facebook are seen by as many people as the user has followers. So photos on networks such as Instagram, Facebook or Google+ will always have more impact than a photo on Snapchat.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how long Snapchat will be able to keep selling a feeling of security when sending photos, since teenagers should know that anything they share on the internet, whether or not they use Snapchat, can be captured. Users could have a false sense of security about compromising photos.
And then the inevitable happens, and many people end up regretting it when it is already too late for regrets.
Featured image: AdamPrzezdziek, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
