app for exchanging ephemeral
messages, an offer of lasting value: $3
billion in cash, according to The Wall
Street Journal. Snapchat, true to its
form, discarded the deal just as it does
the 350 million messages it handles
every day.
The rebuffed offer, more than three
times the value of Facebook's
successful bid for Instagram, comes as
2-year-old Snapchat explores a
massive funding round at around a $4
billion valuation.
Though the Venice, Calif.-based
company doesn't make money or
disclose the exact size of its user base,
Snapchat has managed to capture the
attention of tweens and teens, a crowd
that's tiring of Facebook. The app is
also estimated to be used by 9 percent
of adult cell phone owners in the US,
according to research conducted by
Pew.
A $3 billion offer for a revenue-less
app hints at Facebook's desperation to
buy the love of the Internet's youngest
users. The social network had
previously bid more than $1 billion
for the simple send-it-and-forget-it
application, according to The Wall
Street Journal. Snapchat's refusal,
unbelievable though it may be,
suggests that the young company is
getting exactly the terms it wants as it
considers taking hundreds of millions
of dollars in financing from investors.
Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan
Spiegel probably won't consider an
acquisition or an investment until
early 2014, sources told the Journal.
For his sake, one can only hope that
disappearing messages don't vanish
from pop culture just as quickly as
they arrived.
Facebook declined to comment on the
rumored bid. Snapchat did not
immediately respond to a request for
comment.
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