For all of Snap’s focus on being a broadcasting service for millennials who share content with larger groups, what’s become clear is the app’s main usage remains where it started: messaging. But that’s not where it is making money.
Instead it makes much of its ad revenue from users’ Stories, where people post picture and video updates to their followers. The problem is that this part of the app isn’t growing. Long term, Snap needs to figure out a way to make money through the narrow scope of person-to-person messaging. It may be time for Snap to stop investing in Stories.