After Snapchat is valued at £24bn, we take a closer look at the social media giant
SNAPCHAT was valued at £24.5billion after its float on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
Evan Spiegel, 26, with fiancee Miranda Kerr, and two pals set up the app in 2011.
Users share snaps, videos or texts that vanish after being viewed. Here are some more Snap Facts.
— CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel, 26, instantly became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire after the firm’s float this week.
— EVAN and his pals got the idea for an app that would make pics vanish after being viewed after a friend’s regrets over sexting pics that could be saved.
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— MORE than 70 per cent of users are female and more than half aged 13 to 17. Two billion pics and videos are viewed a day – 9,000 a second.
— THERE are 158million users including 10million in the UK. They can add drawings, filters or special effects to their pics or videos.
— A HUGE 93 per cent of Snapchat users have at some point sent a picture of their drink. Fifteen per cent have sent a picture of their private parts.
— THE original name for the app was Picaboo. It was marketed as a way to send sexy pics “for peeks not keeps”. Renamed aftertwo months.
— WHEN Bond film Spectre was released, Sony paid a fortune so users could add 007-style gun sights over their images for one day only.
— MARK ZUCKERBERG, boss of Facebook, has attempted to buy Snapchat three times over the years, offering up to £3.2billion.
— EVAN, who is from LA, dated Taylor Swift for a couple of months in 2014 before he met Miranda. He is a licensed helicopter pilot.
— REAL-time data can be added to images, such as the time a photo was taken, the temperature where it was taken or the speed the sender is travelling at.
— CEO Evan will not have sex with fiancee Miranda Kerr until they marry. The Aussie model, 33, says he is “very traditional”.
— THE Sun’s brilliant daily Snapchat edition is seen by up to A MILLION readers every day. It is found on the app’s news platform, called Discover.
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