There aren’t many companies who would refuse to be bought by Facebook for $3 billion, as Snapchat is reported to have just done. But few companies can deliver the kind of engagement performance that new research from Mobidia now reveals. According to the mobile analytics firm, while the number of American Android phone owners who are active on Twitter stayed at 19% between January and October, the number of active Snapchat users exploded from 7% to 18% during the same time period.
As incredible as it may sound, this would seem to imply that Snapchat may be about to pass Twitter when it comes to active monthly users among US Android phone owners. We don’t know what the iPhone numbers look like, but they typically yield roughly similar trends as Android. Snapchat’s Android engagement growth is stellar and its download performance on iPhone has been stunning: It has basically floated between No. 5 and No. 15 on the free iOS app download chart all year.
The Snapchat owners may be greedy, but not necessarily foolish. They just might be able to barrel ahead of Twitter in monthly engagement and emerge as a more popular service in early 2014. Twitter has a market cap of $25 billion, even though it is not profitable. Why should Snapchat settle for one-tenth of that in this investing climate?
