Snapchat Parent Poised for $24 Billion Valuation in IPO

As Snap Inc looks to gobble up a larger share of the $82 billion digital U.S.ad market, the owner of the ephemeral messaging app popular with millennials could find itself facing more demands from advertisers for reliable metrics.

Venice, California-based Snap, Inc. has officially priced its IPO, saying on Wednesday afternoon that it will sell 200M shares of its common stock at $17.00 per share. For the analyst, the ultimate risk lies here, as Snap’s enticing demographic following could swap loyalties to one of Facebook’s features instead.

At $24 billion, Snap is still considerably less valuable than the $104 billion Facebook was valued at when it went public in 2012, but more than twice Twitter’s current $11 billion valuation. AP’s earlier story is below.

Still, for now, investors have set those concerns aside to focus on the potential. Its current offering range values it at a maximum of $22.5 billion. Leaked New York Times the day before its IPO, the project remains internal the secretive Snap, if it’s anything other than a play to make headlines before the big day.

A final decision will be made tomorrow on the price of Snap’s IPO.

The main achievement of Snap is Snapchat, an app famous for its disappearing messages, photos and videos. In a sense, it’s ahead of the game. The photo-sharing site released a new tool a year ago called Instagram Stories that lets photos and videos disappear from the site after 24 hours. The drone would help capture unique angles and events. But the company also revealed that while it had amassed more than 150 million daily active users, that growth was slowing, and its costs of revenue had ballooned to around $450 million.

With Facebook well into its second decade, Snapchat is seemingly the social network of choice for the mobile-first generation, but that’s not necessarily a true reflection of its audience, according to research from eMarketer. So Snapchat would have the upper hand here if it releases a mini drone that’s easy to fly and shoot around with, notes The Next Web. “It was like one more thing to do”.

While older users might gravitate toward Snapchat’s original content, younger users are known to go streaking. Alternatively, seen from the investors’ perspective, they’re being diluted by that much.

And in the Snapchat IPO filing, Snapchat said it may never be profitable.

That doesn’t necessarily just mean that Snap wants to make cameras, though past year it launched Spectacles, actual physical sunglasses that snap photos for you. Turn the camera to selfie mode, and you get a bunch of filters to overlay on your face. Anthony concludes, “Advertisers view that demo as trend setters and their view is that the sooner they attach their brands to those users, the longer those users stay with their brands”. “Wall Street’s view is that Snap is more Facebook than Twitter”, Andrew Bary wrote in Barron’s magazine this week. She added Snapchat recently to stay in touch with her 17-year-old son.