Yes. They have your attention and they can do things to slowly nudge you to start engaging in deeper ways. For example your daughter grows up and is used to the "Snap-like" interaction already and will engage far more on Snapchat or similar products. Or maybe she one day finds the "Discover" section of the app and starts watching content on there.
The fact that they have you and your daughter engaging with the product at all is a meaningful thing for the business. There's a lot they can do with even this cursory engagement over time.
Nope. This sounds very SV-ish and I don't mean that in a disrespectful way.
I am not a Snap user period. To count my daughter as a user is just plain sad from an investment point of view. She is not going to have a job for 9 years minimum. That means I control the purse strings.
Sanp is like those games that have a gajillion users and then simply die as no one plays them anymore.
If you buy a newspaper only to let your dog pee on it, are you a user of the newspaper? Just because you (or your child) don't use the product in the way it was intended doesn't mean you're not a user as far as the provider is concerned.
(And the fact that there was a monetary transaction for the paper is not unlike going through the pains of downloading and installing an app on your phone.)
Have you worked in consumer tech or marketing before? I think you're severely discounting your usage of the product and what that means for the company. The reality is that usage and engagement are completely different metrics. And even in the engagement category there are a whole suite of metrics for "depth of engagement".
That means roughly this:
* It's a funnel (one that is heavily tracked)
* They know how often and how deep users' engagement patterns are and how they shift over time, over different feature launches, and over the age of their users among other parameters.
* They know what it takes to get a lightly engaging user to become one that is more deeply engaging and they know the rate at which this conversion happens.
* They have cohorts of users and they know what types of users move which way through the funnel and how fast.
* Using all this data, they have at their disposal different levers to pull (growth, marketing, product) to move the numbers in the right direction.
Again, all of this doesn't mean that Snapchat will be successful in converting you or your daughter into a heavy Snapchat user today or even tomorrow. But you're painting too simple of a picture using a single high level metric and logical simplification of a process that's very complicated.
The biggest point I want to make here is that NO TWO USERS ARE THE SAME. So to use a high level metric that conflates different types of users by definition and then making an implication about the health of a company using this specific metric's weakness is just silly. There is data that you don't have access to and you're not recognizing that.
If you watch the advertisements and can actually act on said advertisements all is well with the system. However, if you have zero spending power, no influence and miss the ads... all is not well.
When are we going to say; What the hell is the point of this? Users "using" something doesn't make it profitable unless they are willing to pay you for it. Furthermore, advertising IS NOT working. Look at retail, malls AND name brands... Horrible performance for the bulk of recent memory.
