As the battle for more users intensifies between the social media giants, it seems that no company is behind in keeping up with each other’s strategy. It has been reported that Snap Inc, the company behind the Snapchat app, chronicled Facebook’s competitive moves in a document which it called “Project Voldemort.”
To recall, Lord Voldemort is the main antagonist in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter book series. In essence, “Project Voldemort” is a dossier that documents Facebook’s “hardball tactics”, reported The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
Both Snap Inc and Facebook have yet to make a formal statement.
As per the Journal, the company blocked searches related to Snapchat terms and also discouraged Snapchat-related content from trending on Instagram’s Explore page. Moreover, the dossier accused Instagram of threatening to take away users’ verified status if they posted Snapchat links on their profile and in 2016 effectively banned users from doing the same.
Snapchat’s Project Voldemort was revealed as a result of Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation into the business practices followed by Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook, as per the Journal. The FTC is speaking to several current and former Facebook rivals as the investigation had started in July this year. It is to be noted that Facebook was fined a mammoth $5 billion for its privacy mishaps in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A year ago, Google too was fined $5 billion by EU authorities for breaking antitrust laws.
However, it is not exactly a secret that Facebook launched a copycat version of a popular Snapchat feature and added them to its platforms – Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook, notably, launched the Stories feature in August 2016 for Instagram and the same feature for its popular instant messaging app in 2017 and called it WhatsApp Status.
As per Vox, adding ‘Stories’ to Instagram was the ‘smartest move’ as it addressed the everyday pressure the Instagram users faced in order to share a “perfect picture”. Adding ‘Stories’ to Instagram helped in giving a much-needed push to the daily traffic to Instagram. And the numbers too speak the same language.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in April 2019 was quoted saying that Facebook Stories have acquired more than 500 million daily active users whereas Mark Zuckerberg stated that both Instagram and WhatsApp secured over 500 million Stories users each.
READ ALSO | WhatsApp rolls out update: Here’s how to share your status as a Facebook story
TechCrunch reported in May 2018 that WhatsApp Status had 450 million daily active users as opposed to 191 million daily users on all of Snapchat, which is drastically less than the former.
However, it has shown growth in terms of number of Snaps. As per the same report, the average number of Snaps created every day increased to over 3.5 billion in Q2 2019.
As per Snapchat Statistics for Q2 2019 based upon IR press release from July 23, 2019, its daily active users saw an increase of 8 per cent year-over-year to 203 million daily active users (DAU) for Q2 2019. There were 190 million daily active users (DAU) in Q1 2019 and 188 million in Q2 2018. This means that Snapchat added 13 million Daily Active Users in the second quarter of 2019, which is still less than both Facebook and Instagram.
On the other hand, Facebook and Instagram are struggling in terms of mobile app downloads – falling a combined 13 percent year-over-year, as per a Bank of America report. Instagram’s competitor Snapchat was up 23 percent.
