The company claims 250 million active users, with half outside the US — it reaped US$700 million in ad revenue in 2018. The year prior, it was valued US$12.3 billion in 2017, with a US$150 million financing. The business garnered US$700 million in, per reports, a 50 percent increase year-on-year.
Buyer Beware?
The days of the dotcom bubble are long-gone. That period of mass hysteria, in which internet companies that had never turned a profit — or even made any revenue whatsoever in some cases — and lacked workable business models were massively inflated in value by private equity capital, and given misleadingly positive ratings by Wall Street analysts, taught investors large and small a great many lessons about irrational market speculation.
For instance, the multi-billion dollar IPO of Snap — the parent company of Snapchat — in March 2017 was the largest in tech sector history since Facebook's. However, it's failed to meet revenue expectations, consistently making vast losses, and has been harshly punished by traders ever since.
