Opinion on Snapchat’s ‘poor countries’: India’s rich potential and poor attitude

Photo credit: Linh Nguyen.

Social media has been burning Snapchat recently, and hashtags like #boycottsnapchat, #uninstallsnapchat, and #snapchatceo have been trending on both Facebook and Twitter.

This happened after a former employee of Snapchat claimed that, during a meeting in 2015, Evan Spiegel described Spain and India as “poor countries.”

It’s sad to see people’s hostile reactions and behavior toward the issue. Even social media influencers, experts, startup mentors, and a lot of other folks joined the abuse without even going deep into the matter to get their facts straight.

Evan’s fiancee, Miranda Kerr, also received humiliating and insulting comments on social media.

Is this really our culture?

The allegation

The former Snapchat employee, Anthony Pompliano, filed a case against Snapchat, claiming various things from false statistics. According to him, when told in a meeting that Snapchat was performing poorly in foreign countries, Evan said, “This app (referring to Snapchat) is only for rich people. I don’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.”

But this statement doesn’t make any sense. Snapchat is free and already has a huge user base in India. You don’t charge users for using your app, but you charge advertisers who want to target your users. Of course, you can up-sell through some in-app purchases but that’s not your main revenue source here. And there are a lot of users and advertisers here in India (Snapchat has not yet opened their app to advertisers in India).

There’s a chance that the allegation might have been said for Snapchat’s hardware product Spectacles (if it were said at all) because saying it for a free app doesn’t really make sense, does it? Spectacles costs roughly around US$125 to US$140 and India can be a tough market to crack for a product that is just for Snapchat and uploading snaps.

In a statement, Snap Inc. spokesperson said on Evan’s behalf:

“This is ridiculous. Obviously, Snapchat is for everyone! It’s available worldwide to download for free. Those words were written by a disgruntled former employee. We are grateful for our Snapchat community in India and around the world.”

Indian consumers are one of the toughest there is especially in the apps category. The average revenue per user in India is much less than that of the other countries. Even the eCPM here is very low for publishers. We are still adapting to the trends with increasing mobile and internet penetration.

There are many apps that are making good revenue through ads and in-app purchases, and this is less than what you earn when you have a social network with so many users. You essentially don’t really have to think about revenues.

The poorness in India

Closing thoughts