Item 1. Business
Item 1. Business.
Overview
Snap Inc. is a camera company. We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way that people live and communicate. We contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together.
Our flagship product, Snapchat, is a camera application that helps people communicate visually with friends and family through short videos and images called Snaps. By opening directly to the camera, we empower users to express themselves instantly. Snaps are deleted by default, so there is less pressure to look pretty or perfect when creating and sending images on Snapchat. By reducing the friction typically associated with creating and sharing content, Snapchat has become one of the most used cameras in the world.
In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones. This is because images created by smartphone cameras contain more context and richer information than other forms of input like text entered on a keyboard. Given the magnitude of this opportunity, we invest heavily and take big risks in an attempt to create innovative and differentiated camera products that are better able to reflect and improve our life experiences.
Snapchat
Snapchat is our core mobile device application and contains five distinct tabs, complemented by additional tools that function outside of the application. With a breadth of visual communication and content experiences available within the application, Snapchatters can interact with all five, or a subset of those five tabs.
Camera : The Camera is the starting point for creation in Snapchat. Snapchat opens directly to the Camera, making it easy to create a Snap and send it to friends. Our augmented reality, or AR, capabilities within our Camera allow for creativity and self-expression. We offer millions of Lenses, created by both us and our community, along with creative tools and licensed music, which make it easy for people to personalize and contextualize their Snaps. We also offer voice and scanning technology within our Camera. While Snaps are deleted by default, users can save their creativity through a searchable collection of Memories stored on both their Snapchat account and their mobile device. A user can also create Snaps on our wearable devices, Spectacles. Spectacles connect seamlessly with Snapchat and capture photos and video from a human perspective.
Communication : Communication allows users to send Snaps to friends collectively or individually, through our ephemeral, efficient messaging architecture. Within Communication, users can send messages through text, Snaps, and voice or video calling. They can also communicate with our proprietary personalized avatar tool, Bitmoji, and its associated contextual stickers and images, which integrate seamlessly into both mobile devices and desktop browsers. Further, users can communicate by playing one of our Games together, many of which allow a user’s avatar to be their Bitmoji, and through Minis, which bring bite-sized utility experiences to our community inside Snapchat.
Snap Map : Snap Map is a live and highly personalized map that allows Snapchatters to connect with friends and explore what is going on in their local area. Snap Map makes it easy to locate nearby friends who choose to share their location, view a heatmap of recent Snaps posted to Our Story by location, and locate local businesses. Places, rich profiles of local businesses that include information such as store hours and reviews, allow Snapchatters to take direct actions from Map, such as sharing a favorite store, ordering takeout, or making a reservation.
Stories : Stories feature content from a Snapchatter’s friends, our community, and our content partners. The Discover section of this tab displays content based on a Snapchatter’s subscriptions and interests, and features news and entertainment from both our creator community and publisher partners, as well as original content in Snap Originals. We also offer Brand Profiles, as a way for our advertising partners to memorialize and scale their content on our platform, as well as Public Profiles for our creator community.
Spotlight : Spotlight is a way to broadly share user-generated content with the entire Snapchat community. Here we surface the most entertaining Snaps from our community all in one place, which becomes tailored to each Snapchatter over time based on their preferences and favorites.
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Our Partner Ecosystem
Many elements and features of Snapchat are enhanced by our expansive partner ecosystem that includes developers, creators, publishers, and advertisers, among others. We help them create and bring content and experiences into Snapchat, leverage Snapchat capabilities in their own applications and websites, and use advertising to promote these and other experiences to our large, engaged, and differentiated user base.
Our Advertising Products
We connect both brand and direct response advertisers to Snapchatters globally. Our ad products are built on the same foundation that makes our consumer products successful. This means that we can take the things we learn while creating our consumer products and apply them to building innovative and engaging advertising products familiar to our community.
AR Ads : Advertising through Snap’s AR tools unlocks the ability to reach a unique audience in a highly differentiated way. Ads can be served as Sponsored Lenses or Sponsored Filters. Lenses are designed through our camera to take advantage of the reach and scale of our augmented reality platform to create visually engaging 3D experiences. Filters are entertaining, artistic overlays that appear after you take a Snap. These Lenses and Filters can be memorialized on Snapchat, through Brand Profiles that aggregate content, filters, and lenses in a single, easy to find place.
Snap Ads : We let advertisers tell their stories the same way our users do, using full screen videos with sound. These also allow advertisers to integrate additional experiences and actions directly within these advertisements, including watching a long-form video, visiting a website, or installing an app. Snap Ads include the following:
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Single Image or Video Ads: These are full screen ads that are skippable, and can contain an attachment to enable Snapchatters to swipe up and take action.
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Story Ads: Story Ads are branded tiles that live within the Discover section of the Stories tab that can be either video ads or a series of 3 to 20 images.
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Collection Ads: Collection Ads feature four tappable tiles to showcase multiple products, giving Snapchatters a frictionless way to browse and buy.
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Dynamic Ads: Dynamic ads leverage our machine learning algorithm to match a product catalog to serve the right ad to the right Snapchatter at the right time.
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Commercials: Commercials are non-skippable for six seconds, but can last up to three minutes. These ads appear within Snapchat’s curated content.
Campaign Management and Delivery : We aim to continually improve the way ads are purchased and delivered. We have invested heavily to build our self-serve advertising platform, which provides automated, sophisticated, and scalable ad buying and campaign management.
We offer the ability to bid for advertisements that are designated to drive Snapchatters to: visit a website, visit a local business, call or text a business, download an app, or return to an app. Additionally, our delivery framework continues to optimize relevance of ads across the entire platform by determining the best ad to show to any given user based on their real-time and historical attributes and activity. This decreases the number of wasted impressions while improving the effectiveness of the ads that are shown to our community. This helps advertisers increase their return on investment by providing more refined targeting, the ability to test and learn with different creatives or campaign attributes in real time, and the dynamics of our self-serve pricing.
Measuring Advertising Effectiveness : We offer third-party and first-party solutions to provide a vast array of analytics on campaign attributes like reach, frequency, demographics, and viewability; changes in perceptions like brand favorability or purchase intent; and lifts in actual behavior like purchases, foot traffic, app installs, and online purchases.
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Technology
Our research and development efforts focus on product development, advertising technology, and large-scale infrastructure.
Product Development : We work relentlessly and invest heavily to create and improve products for our community and our partners. We develop a wide range of products related to visual communication and storytelling that are powered by a variety of new technologies.
Advertising Technology : We constantly develop and expand our advertising products and technology. In an effort to provide a strong and scalable return on investment to our advertisers, our advertising technology roadmap centers around improving our delivery framework, measurement capabilities, and self-serve tools.
Large-scale Infrastructure : We spend considerable resources and investment on the underlying architecture that powers our products, such as optimizing the delivery of billions of videos to millions of people around the world every day. We currently partner with providers like Google and Amazon to support the infrastructure for our growing needs. These partnerships have allowed us to scale quickly without upfront infrastructure costs, allowing us to focus our efforts on product innovation.
Employees and Culture
We seek to be a force for good through our products, our work to strengthen our communities, our efforts to make a positive impact on the planet, and our inclusive workplace.
Supporting Our Team : Our values at Snap are being kind, smart, and creative, and we put those values into action through how we support our team and how our team supports one another. Our practice of Council, which is a practice of active listening that promotes open-mindedness and cultivates empathy and compassion among participants, helps us build and sustain a community steeped in integrity, connection, collaboration, creativity, and kindness. Our talent development programs seek to unlock potential by helping team members advance, learn, and grow in a fair and equitable way at Snap. We focus on the health and well-being of our employees through programs and benefits that support their physical, emotional, and financial fitness. To attract and retain the best talent, we aim to offer challenging work in an environment that enables our employees to have a direct meaningful contribution to new and exciting projects. Underlying these values is our commitment to ethical conduct where we work to instill in our team that acting with integrity means being your whole self, being honest, and doing the right thing.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion : Snap has long supported a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, program, and we have made progress on a number of fronts, including diversifying our board of directors and executive leadership, introducing new accountability around DEI outcomes, rolling out an allyship program to inspire a more inclusive culture, and enhancing our recruiting process to continue driving diverse hiring. To aid in our mission, we published our first Diversity Annual Report in 2020 to discuss our goals with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. This report outlines our beliefs around the idea that an inclusive workplace and inclusive products are central to achieving that purpose. This report is part of our larger Citizen Snap Report that details the work we’re doing to support our communities, our planet, and our team, and is available on our website at www.snap.com.
Human Capital : As part of our human capital resource objectives, we seek to recruit, retain, and incentivize our highly talented existing and future employees. We believe that creating an inclusive environment where team members can grow, develop, and be their true selves is critical to attracting and retaining talent. Our compensation philosophies also align to that belief.
Our compensation philosophy is based around building a culture of ownership and high performance by putting both impact and our values at the center of our performance feedback process and pay outcomes. We utilize equity as part of our compensation practices to drive a long term orientation and have committed to paying a minimum living wage for all employees globally.
As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 3,863 full-time employees, of whom approximately 54% are in engineering roles involved in the design, development, support, and manufacture of new and existing products and processes.
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Our Commitment to Privacy
Our approach to privacy is simple: Be upfront, offer choices, and never forget that our community comes first.
We built Snapchat as an antidote to the context-less communication that has plagued “social media.” Not so long ago, a conversation among friends would be just that: a private communication in which you knew exactly who you were talking to, what you were talking about, and whether what you were saying was being memorialized for eternity. Somewhere along the way, social media—by prioritizing virality and permanence—sapped conversations of this valuable context and choice. When we began to communicate online, we lost some of what made communication great: spontaneity, emotion, honesty—the full range of human expression that makes us human in the first place.
We don’t think digital communication has to be this way. That’s why choice matters. We build products and services that emphasize the context of a conversation—who, when, what, and where something is being said. If you don’t have the autonomy to shape the context of a conversation, the conversation will simply be shaped by the permanent feeds that homogenize online conversations.
When you read our Privacy Policy, we hope that you’ll notice how much we care about the integrity of personal communication. For starters, we’ve written our Privacy Policy in plain language because we think it’s important that everyone understand exactly how we handle their information. Otherwise, it’s hard to make informed choices about how you communicate. We’ve also created a robust Privacy Center where we show that context and choice are more than talking points. There, we point out the many ways that users can control who sees their Snaps and Stories, and explain how long content will remain on our servers, how users can manage the information that we do have about them, and much more. This is where you’ll also find our Transparency Report.
We also understand that privacy policies—no matter how ambitious—are only as good as the people and practices behind those policies. When someone trusts us to transmit or store their information, we know we have a responsibility to protect that information and we work hard to keep it secure. New features go through an intense privacy-review process—we debate pros and cons, and we work hard to build products we’re proud of and that we’ll want to use. We use Snapchat constantly, both at work and in our personal lives, and we handle user information with the same care that we want for our family, our friends, and ourselves.
Competition
We compete with other companies in every aspect of our business, particularly with companies that focus on mobile engagement and advertising. Many of these companies, such as Apple, Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp), Google (including YouTube), and Twitter, have significantly greater financial and human resources and, in some cases, larger user bases. Given the breadth of our product offerings, we also compete with companies that develop products or otherwise operate in the mobile, camera, communication, content, and advertising industries that offer, or will offer, products and services that may compete with Snapchat features or offerings. Our competitors span from internet technology companies and digital platforms, including advertising-supported video on demand platforms, to traditional companies in print, radio, and television sectors to underlying technologies like default smartphone cameras and messaging. Additionally, our competition for engagement varies by region. For instance, we face competition from companies like Kakao, LINE, Naver (including Snow), Bytedance (including TikTok), and Tencent in Asia.
We compete to attract and retain our users’ attention, both in terms of reach and engagement. Since our products and those of our competitors are typically free, we compete based on our brand and the quality and nature of our product offerings rather than on price. As such, we invest heavily in constantly improving and expanding our product lines.
We also compete with other companies to attract and retain partners and advertisers, which depends primarily on our reach and ability to deliver a strong return on investment.
Finally, we compete to attract and retain highly talented individuals, including software engineers, designers, and product managers. In addition to providing competitive compensation packages, we compete for talent by fostering a culture of working hard to create great products and experiences and allowing our employees to have a direct meaningful contribution to new and exciting projects.
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Seasonality in Our Business
We have historically seen seasonality in our business. Overall advertising spend tends to be strongest in the fourth quarter of the calendar year, and we have observed a similar pattern in our historical revenue. We have also experienced seasonality in our user engagement, generally seeing lower engagement during summer months and higher engagement in December.
Intellectual Property
Our success depends in part on our ability to protect our intellectual property and proprietary technologies. To protect our proprietary rights, we rely on a combination of intellectual property rights in the United States and other jurisdictions, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secret laws, license agreements, internal procedures, and contractual provisions. We also enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors and sign confidentiality agreements with third parties. Our internal controls are designed to restrict access to proprietary technology.
As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 872 issued patents and approximately 1,661 filed patent applications in the United States and foreign countries relating to our camera platform and other technologies. Our issued patents will expire between 2021 and 2045. We may not be able to obtain protection for our intellectual property, and our existing and future patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property rights may not provide us with competitive advantages or distinguish our products and services from those of our competitors. Our patent applications may not result in the issuance of patents, and any resulting issued patents may have claims narrower than those in our patent applications. Additionally, our current and future patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property rights may be contested, circumvented, or found unenforceable or invalid, and we may not be able to prevent third parties from infringing them. Our internal controls and contractual provisions may not always be effective at preventing unauthorized parties from obtaining our intellectual property and proprietary technologies.
We license content, trademarks, technology, and other intellectual property from our partners, and rely on our license agreements with those partners to use the intellectual property. We also enter into licensing agreements with third parties to receive rights to patents and other know-how. Third parties may assert claims related to intellectual property rights against our partners or us.
Other companies and “non-practicing entities” that own patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and other intellectual property rights related to the mobile, camera, communication, content, internet, and other technology-related industries frequently enter into litigation based on allegations of infringement, misappropriation, and other violations of intellectual property or other rights. Third parties, including our competitors and non-practicing entities, have and may continue to make claims from time to time that we have infringed their patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, or other intellectual property rights. We are party to many agreements under which we are obligated to indemnify our customers, suppliers, and channel partners against such claims. As our business continues to grow and competition increases, we will likely face more claims related to intellectual property and litigation matters.
Government Regulation
We are subject to many U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations, including those related to privacy, rights of publicity, data protection, content regulation, intellectual property, health and safety, competition, protection of minors, consumer protection, and taxation. These laws and regulations are constantly evolving and may be interpreted, applied, created, or amended in a manner that could harm our business. Compliance with these laws and regulations has not had, and is not expected to have, a material effect on our capital expenditures, results of operations, and competitive position as compared to prior periods, and we do not currently anticipate material capital expenditures for environmental control facilities.
In December 2014, the Federal Trade Commission resolved an investigation into some of our early practices by handing down a final order. That order requires, among other things, that we establish a robust privacy program to govern how we treat user data. During the 20-year lifespan of the order, we must complete biennial independent privacy audits. In June 2014, we entered into a 10-year assurance of discontinuance with the Attorney General of Maryland implementing similar practices, including measures to prevent minors from creating accounts and providing annual compliance reports. Violating existing or future regulatory orders or consent decrees could subject us to substantial monetary fines and other penalties that could negatively affect our financial condition and results of operations.
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Furthermore, foreign data protection, privacy, consumer protection, content regulation, and other laws and regulations are often more restrictive than those in the United States. It is possible that certain governments may seek to block or limit our products or otherwise impose other restrictions that may affect the accessibility or usability of any or all our products for an extended period of time or indefinitely. Not all of our products are available in all locations and may not be due to such laws and regulations. We have a public policy team that monitors legal and regulatory developments in the United States, as well as many foreign countries, and communicates with policymakers and regulators in the United States and internationally.
Corporate Information
We were formed as Future Freshman, LLC, a California limited liability company, in 2010. We changed our name to Toyopa Group, LLC in 2011, incorporated as Snapchat, Inc., a Delaware corporation, in 2012, and changed our name to Snap Inc. in 2016. We completed our initial public offering in March 2017 and our Class A common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, or NYSE, under the symbol “SNAP.”
Our principal executive offices are located at 2772 Donald Douglas Loop North, Santa Monica, California 90405, and our telephone number is (310) 399-3339. Snap Inc., “Snapchat,” and our other registered and common-law trade names, trademarks, and service marks appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are property of Snap Inc. or our subsidiaries.
Information about Segment and Geographic Revenue
Information about segment and geographic revenue is set forth in Notes 1 and 2 of the notes to our consolidated financial statements included in “Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Available Information
Our website address is www.snap.com. Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act are filed with the SEC. Such reports and other information filed or furnished by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at investor.snap.com when such reports are available on the SEC’s website. We use our website, including investor.snap.com, as a means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD.
Information contained in, or accessible through, the websites referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K is not incorporated into this filing. Further, our references to website addresses are only as inactive textual references.
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