What was that about Snapchat? The app remains very popular with younger smartphone users, but a new report by research firm Owler has placed it in a club its owners wouldn’t have wanted to join: a Dead Unicorn Study. It’s a report on the “unicorns” (startups valued at more than $1bn) that are most likely to kick the bucket in the next few years.
Owler also put them in order, so it thinks Snapchat is more likely to fail than GrabTaxi, Theranos, CloudFlare, Lookout and Lazada, but less likely to go belly-up than Powa, Houzz, Didi Dache and Magic Leap. But why does it think Snapchat is doomed? Owler claims that its “incredibly fickle youth-oriented market” is the biggest factor: “Such virality is capricious, and shows the company is at risk. Therefore, of any on Unicorn, Snapchat is the most likely to go under — and in a timeline of 15 to 20 months”. We’d venture a different opinion: even if its momentum starts to sag, Snapchat will manage to sell rather than fail.
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