Is Snapchat the next Netscape? With Data mining and search it looks to keep its incumbent competitors on their toes at least for the short-term.

It's an story reminiscent of the epic browser wars (remember those? Explorer vs. Netscape) with the upstart constantly looking for that silver bullet that will enable it to leap-frog the competition while the incumbent simply mimics any new innovation thrown at it by integrating it into its already healthy portfolio (see Instagram Global Stores: http://adage.com/article/digital/instagram-global-stories-campaign-juxtaposes-epic-silly-heat-snapchat/308485/?utm_source=digital_email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=adage&ttl=1491843803&utm_visit=682760). Today the players names are replaced with Snap and Facebook. The key difference in this edition is that neither has a hardware play that would enable them to seamlessly bundle their offerings allowing them to be the default provider of choice for all users..at least not yet. To that end Snapchat Inc. renamed itself Snap Inc, in an attempt to communicate that it is more then just an app. The rebranding/pivot (aka revot?) was punctuated when co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said that the company was actually a camera company and followed that up with the launch of its Spectacles product. Now with the launch of a search function Snap actually seems to be following Facebook's strategy and pushed itself into another competitor in Alphabet's Google. Or even better with if you look at the camera positioning and the telling of stories equaling out to short-form content creation is Snap really going after Alphabet's other key business, YouTube. That being said there are some key facts to point out in Snaps endeavor to unset it's rivals as a key destination for content which then would attract dollars from advertisers and make it a sustainable business and a real competitive threat. Facebook: 1.5 billion searches per day and over 2 trillion posts Google: 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year YouTube: YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day, 1.3 billion people use YouTube, 80% of YouTube's views are from outside of the U.S. Snapchat: 158 million daily active users, 2.5 billion Snaps per day http://www.adweek.com/digital/snapchat-is-adding-a-search-function-that-lets-users-sift-through-over-1-million-stories/?utm_campaign=nl_4&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=AWK_TodayTech But it's also more then just getting their message/brand in front of Snap's millennial based user-group. For advertisers they also need to activate those users to purchase their products. Snap needs to show advertisers that it is able to mine its data to enable them to not only get in front of the right user at the right time but also build out the capability for users to leave Snapchat to then engage with their brand with the goal of making a purchase. This is no easy task when Google, Pinterest and Facebook all have app-install advertising capabilities. http://www.adweek.com/digital/will-snapchats-data-play-help-fend-off-competition-from-facebook-and-instagram/?utm_campaign=nl_1&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=AWK_TodayTech Netscape started with over ninety percent of the browser usage in the mid-1990s before being pummeled into submission to less than one percent by the end of 2006. But before that it was acquired by AOL for $4.2 billion. Not too shabby. Snap rejected a Facebook offer of $3 billion and now it is worth $25 billion so it's fair to say it has done better then Netscape and has not turned into the repeat of Groupon (it was offered $6 billion by Google) but it will certainly have to keep its knives sharpened as it continues to seek out new ways to attract users and advertisers to its platforms while fending off its competition.