Over the past few years, Snapchat has been building up an increasingly complex weave of partnerships.
They have their advertising partners that power the vast majority of their monetization efforts. They have app developers on Snap Kit that they are also selling new features like CameraKit and Minis to. They’re bringing game developers on board for their Snap Games initiative, including another partnership with Zynga, which they announced today. They’re also continuing to chase mobile-first original content programming for Snapchat Discover. Sometimes these distinctions can create grey areas. For instance, in a conversation with TechCrunch, Ben Schwerin, Snap’s VP of Partnerships, insists Snapchat isn’t competitive with Quibi, which is an advertising partner.
“Comparing Quibi and Snapchat — and I know it’s easy to do — is like comparing cable TV and Snapchat,” he says.
Snapchat is perhaps better positioned than any other app in the United States to replicate what Tencent’s WeChat has pulled off in China, turning a friend-to-friend messaging app into a national platform. Snap is still a long way from pulling that off, but on Thursday at their annual Snap Partner Summit, they shared some of the required building blocks for making that happen, namely richer third-party experiences via upgrades to their developer kit and a new initiative called Snap Minis.
Snap says they now have 800 developers that have integrated with Snap Kit and that a combined 150 million users access these integrations on a monthly basis.
In the U.S., developers have had a largely frayed relationship with social media companies. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have significantly locked down many of the developer capabilities they launched with, often turning off features that were key to developer experiences overnight. Snapchat’s dedicated developer platform Snap Kit is only two years old at this point, but witnessing the pitfalls faced by Facebook in regard to privacy has allowed Snap to build out a platform that brings developers into the fold with certain features but keeps the real treasure — Snapchat’s social graph — buried inside its walled garden.
“Traditionally, when you think of these platforms, the value is data. The value is what data a third party is going to be able to get about you and your friends, and that turns out to have some real issues,” said Schwerin. “So, we took a much different approach, which is that Login Kit is going to power really creative, unique experiences and that’s going to be the value for partners. So the reason why you would have Login Kit is not because that will give you access to data; it’s because it will give you access to amazing features like app Stories, for example, or Bitmoji.”
At Snap Partner Summit this year, the company’s big update to Snap Kit was a new vertical available to developers called Camera Kit, which brings Snap’s augmented reality-powered Lenses into third-party apps. During a period where video chat tech has been skyrocketing in usage, Snap Camera has been getting added lift as apps like Zoom have turned into socially distant socializing apps and goofy AR filters have proven a fun way to shake up those platforms. Camera Kit is launching with some significant users already onboard including Nike and the MLB.
Snap has long maintained that they are a “camera company,” but giving away the camera as part of their developer platform isn’t something they foresee cannibalizing Snapchat consumption among users. “It’s not a replacement, meaning you’re not going to open a partner’s app and see an exact copy of what you see in Snapchat, you’re going to see Lenses that are contextually relevant that were made in Lens studio,” Schwerin says.
The company’s ubiquitous selfie Lenses have had a busy year. Snap says that more than 75% of their daily active users, use AR every day. Two years ago, the company shared that creators had designed more than 100,000 Lenses inside its Lens Studio software. Today, the company shared that more than one million Lenses had been created. “We do see a future where computing is overlaid on the world, we really believe in augmented reality,” said Schwerin.
Focusing less on giving data access to its developer partners has left Snap in the occasionally uncomfortable position of having to sell their vision of the future to their own partners, particularly with efforts like augmented reality, which Snap has long pioneered.
Setting expectations has been one area where Snap has — to date — seemed to fare better than its competitors, which have at times been criticized for pulling the rug out from under its partners in response to crisis.