Snapchat model

Recently, Snapchat Co-founder and CEO, Evan Spiegel, defended that Snapchat is not a sexting app while talking to Business-Insider.

Here’s what Snapchat does: Users can click pics and send it to a friend, the image self destroys in 10 seconds. What’s interesting is the receiver cannot save the pic or even take a screenshot. Or rather warn the sender if the receiver takes a screenshot.

Now I’m sure even you might think this makes the app ideal for sexting. But Spiegel argues that 80 percent of the snaps taken are during day time. Btw, the company claims that users send about 30 million snaps per day through the app. For reference, as of August 2012, 300 million photos are uploaded on Facebook everyday. We don’t have the number of users use Snapchat but it’s definitely going to be much much lesser than Facebook. So by that comparison, 30M uploads in a day is not that bad.

According to the BI report, Spiegel also doesn’t have proof of what people are taking pictures of, which means we can’t really say whether the app is used for sexting or not. But that’s a good thing since it shows the company does not invade user privacy.

Model Psychology 

I was surprised when a friend told me about all those apps on the app store for sexting. I checked up Apple’s iOS store and Android. And boy there are plenty of apps for sexting. Many even with exactly similar features as Snapchat.

But then why is Snapchat shying away from branding itself as sexting app? Clearly there’s lot of action going on in that genre.

What I feel is Snapchat thinks that it has something on its hand and that they can expand the model. And once it gets branding as the sexting app it would be difficult to come out of it. And that’s happened with plenty of web apps out there. It’s difficult to change people’s perception once they have made up their mind.