This regional competitor is quietly taking over Snapchat in Asia

Just as Snapchat has really started to establish its presence in Asia, along comes a regional competitor (or some would say clone) to take Asia’s ephemeral, vertical video, puppy-faced, rainbow-vomiting crown. But which is winning and which will successfully monetise in Asia?

Snow hails from land of K-Pop, South Korea. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, thanks to Korean dramas, K-Pop and plastic surgery, it’s seen as the aspirational compass for a lot of young Asian girls. And where girls go, guys often follow. (Something Snow has picked up when marketing the app, see the video below.)

Secondly, is created by Camp Mobile, which is a 100 percent owned subsidiary of Naver Corp. Naver has Korea’s biggest search engine and messaging app ecosystem. Line messenger is a Naver owned subsidiary, and is the biggest messenger app ecosystem in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and is pretty massive in Indonesia too.

This is important because Snow seamlessly integrates with Line and KakaoTalk, making it easy to share Snow selfies and videos on these platforms, and organically attract new users through peer endorsement (and FOMO).

Snow surpasses Snapchat in key Asian markets

The below data from App Annie charts the daily performance of Snapchat and Snow in the Play Store over the last four months, and it offers some striking insights.

Snapchat’s performance on the Play Store.

Snow’s performance on the Play Store.

Snapchat was generally performing well and back in June, taking number 4 position in The Philippines, number 15 in Japan and number 25 in Indonesia out of all apps in the Play Store.

This is no given, particularly in Japan, where whilst Twitter and Instagram perform well, Facebook, and especially WhatsApp, don’t have the scale they have in other developed markets. Thailand’s performance was less impressive, and Snapchat hasn’t made a dent in Korea.

We can see that in May and June, Snow really started to take off, reaching number 1 on the Play Store in Japan and number 2 in Korea, with Thailand being a respectable 53. What happens after is very interesting.

Why is Snow becoming popular?

What will happen next?