It feels like just yesterday that Instagram egregiously “borrowed” the Snapchat features and design elements when they rolled out Instagram Stories. It was right around the time influencers started going #viral with their own inputs, Twitter was getting louder than normal, and everyone around our office (a technology company) started to get this glaring feeling: “Snapchat is dead.”
That feeling lingered as bankers and non-techies would ask me, “So, Ben, what do you think of Snapchat?” I stayed consistent even through their $3.4B raise in their IPO round. “They won’t make it a year. Facebook is going to destroy them.”
Ten months and some changes later, I’m starting to reconsider my past sentiments. Snapchat may no longer be the coolest social network around, but I think it’s a big mistake to say they’re out of the race.
Fickle players make an interesting game.
You see, it’s not the advisors, lawyers, or analysts that matter. It’s the 15-year-old non-binary introvert that’s currently obsessed with Musical.ly, fame, and motivational quotes on Instagram. A social media power user that flip flops more than any presidential candidate and is harder to read than last year’s World Series of Poker champion. But there’s one thing about them that’s certainly true, and that they’ve got in common with Millennials: they have zero loyalty.
As of late, Instagram has been catching some major “L’s,” as the youngsters like to say. Between leaks of manipulation, bots, and Influencers breaking FTC laws to promote products or music festivals on their page, we’ve seen some interesting turns with Facebook’s protégé. As a Goliath, you wonder how long something can continue to stay relevant before “taking an L” in today’s fast-paced world.
Millennials can smell a rat.
So, what was the latest L thrown? Well, on one of the most notorious lifestyle influencers on Instagram, Jay Alvarrez. He’s a promoter out of Hawaii who manufactured an “Insta famous” content creator career overnight with now ex-girlfriend, Alexis Ren.
Jay is notorious for his perfect life traveling the globe, his hot girlfriend, his 6 pack, and his manbun. According to sources, the 21-year old has raked in more than $1.6M in earnings from YouTube payouts and brand sponsorships. I presume that figure is a lot higher now since his latest stunt in Dubai.
Last week Jay published a new video sponsored by Dubai and the United Arab Emirates where he brags about the blank check budget he had to fly in his friends from LA, borrow some Saudi royalty Lamborghinis for the shoot, and act extremely recklessly in the sand dunes of the UAE. You can’t shoot this without some borrowed lions and tigers hanging from the passenger side of the car.
The whole video reeked of sponsored content and was really underwhelming. I mean, think about the possibilities when a Saudi prince gives you a blank check to shoot some content.
Well, Jay’s followers felt the same way as soon as it went viral. Let’s just say they turned on him real quick and the hate spread like a cancer all over Instagram. He even had to publish a “mixed feelings” memo almost instantaneously to react to all the hate.
The backlash spread so fast that within five days he actually decided to sell his $110k tricked out Mercedes SUV and move from LA to cleanse his soul, as he writes on his last Instagram post on his way to Moscow, Russia. This should be a reminder that you can’t trick the Gen Z generation with subliminal sponsored content: they will roast you quicker than any Reddit troll can organize. They know their ads.
Nobody’s out of the race.
With events like this becoming more and more common, social media influencers have taken to new platforms to start promoting original content.
Take Snapchat. Gary Vaynerchuk, influencer extraordinaire, was one of the first to start promoting or re-promoting his Snapchat over the weekend. He even included his own Bitmoji. Something about the UI and the ephemerality gives Snapchat something of a more personalized feel, and it’s not as easy to manipulate with bots and other tools as other platforms. Snapchat forces content creators to express themselves in a more authentic way.
Nobody ever doubted whether Snapchat could innovate. They bled innovation ever since their early days of expiring nude selfies. They rebranded, released a hardware product, and went public all in a single year. They operate pretty nimbly for a startup tech unicorn.
The challenge has always been whether they would be able to retain their users and keep up with the engagement and eyeballs that Instagram has been sniping from them.
At first, I had my mind made up about the Instagram vs. Snapchat debate: Instagram will trounce them in the end. With the deep pockets of Facebook and peripheral access to a record-shattering user base of 2 billion, Instagram seemed like the clear cut victor.
Now, though, I’m not so sure.
Snapchat is a hard company to predict, and while their innovations sometimes seem frivolous, they’re often wins for the brand, even if they’re not wins financially. It’s hard to know if that will be enough to keep them going, but Snapchat’s history has been one of continuous surprises – so for now, I’m open to being surprised.
I, for one, am going to enjoy this ride and possibly even put my bet on Snapchat for this round. When parents join Instagram it’s a sign to run away and never look back, but personally, I don’t know many parents who have even figured out how the interface on Snapchat works. And according to AppAnnie, we’re still seeing a pretty nice trajectory of user downloads on Snapchat.
So, what’s the lesson to be learned from all this? Never call the race before you see the photo. Goliath may seem like he’s in control, but Gen Zs are near clairvoyant with ads and have zero loyalty. If you piss them off, they’ll torch a billion-dollar platform overnight and bring convoys of followers with them.
It may look like the race is over – but something tells me it’s just getting started.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.