Snapchat promises to upend social media rivals by offering advertisers to pay based on TV-style ratings. Advertisers have long demanded advertising accountability from social media platforms, including Snapchat and Facebook.
A sure way of doing it is third-party measurements. Nielsen’s digital ratings would go a long way towards that goal. But the dramatic step the company is adopting goes on to show that not everything is rosy for the platform.
The initial public offering Snapchat is planning for this year will surely be a big deal. Yet this house believes that social media are overpaid, oversexed and over here, as British soldiers teased their American peers during World War Two. We’ll talk again in ten years, or much sooner.