The INSIDER Summary:

• On-demand geofilters can be purchased by businesses or individuals for branded events or spaces.
• Community geofilters can also be submitted by any user to highlight landmarks, universities, and other public hotspots. 
• Now, users can design their own.

Snapchat users can now design a geofilter for custom travel experiences, like your work outing to Nantucket or your stay at a chic all-inclusive. 

Users can make two types of custom geofilters: community and on-demand. Community geofilters can be submitted by any user to highlight landmarks, universities, and other public hotspots. On-demand geofilters, meanwhile, can be purchased by businesses or individuals for branded events or spaces.

Here's how to make one:

Download a template

Travelers creating an on-demand geofilter have two options: make a completely unique design, or build a geofilter online using a Snapchat template.

To design a filter on Adobe Photoshop, head to Snapchat's website and click on the geofilters tab on the top header.

For community geofilters, you'll find a page explaining specifications for the file, as well as a tab that says Download Templates.

Click there to download the Adobe Photoshop template.

On the "Use Your Own" option, you'll see a link for downloadable templates for Photoshop, which range from birthday messages to anniversary greetings. If you'd prefer to create a geofilter online, click Create Online, where you'll see designs for birthdays, celebrations, and weddings.

Each category has a variety of filters, colors, and fonts.

Create your design

Be sure you're following Snapchat's specific guidelines when designing (think: keeping your geofilter local rather than covering an entire country, state, or province). Additionally, all graphics used on community filters must be 100 percent original — no logos or trademarks of any kind — except in the case of college or university logos submitted by authorized school officials. Snapchat also prohibits the use of photographs or hashtags.

For on-demand filters, users must have to have the necessary rights and permissions for any business names, logos, or trademarks.

Be sure you upload the image as a transparent PNG Adobe Photoshop file with a width of 1080 pixels and a height of 1920 pixels, and that the file is under 300KB.

Upload

Once your design is ready, you can upload the file to Snapchat. For community filters, you’ll be asked to include your name, e-mail, and provide details about why the location is important to you. Snapchat reviews all community filters for approval. You'll then create a geofence—the geographic boundary where your geofilter can be used.

Simply click on the map and drag the arrows to frame the area.

On-demand geofilter designers will be directed to a calendar, where you can select how long you'd like your geofilter will be available.

Afterward, you create a geofence: the price will decrease or increase based on the size of your zone.

Prices for on-demand geofilters start at $5 for a geofence of 20,000-square-feet. The cost will also increase the longer you intend to use the geofilter.

Finally, submit your image for approval. Snapchat will typically respond to on-demand filter creators within one business day — perfect for that totally spontaneous trip to Paris.

SEE ALSO: This one-person startup that sells pizza was so profitable, the founder hired over 100 people in less than a year with hardly any investors

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Toyota created a $392 baby robot to help comfort people in Japan without children

Millennials are spending more time than ever watching short-form video content on their mobile devices, and players like Facebook and Snapchat are reaping the benefits.

These platforms — which capture billions of video views each day — are competing to capture growing mobile audiences and challenge the historical dominance of YouTube. The ensuing bout will create a new set of opportunities for content creators looking to cash in on the mobile video craze.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has developed a slide deck discussing how Facebook and Snapchat are shaking up mobile video.

Today, it can be yours for free. As an added bonus, you will gain immediate access to the team’s exclusive FREE newsletter, BI Intelligence Daily.

To get your copy of this slide deck, simply click here.

Join the conversation about this story »

Snapchat continues to be the fastest growing social network among teens, according to a new survey by Piper Jaffray.

The survey, which polled 10,000 teens with an average age of 16 across 46 U.S. states, found that Snapchat remains the most used social app followed closely by Instagram.

Meanwhile, Facebook usage declined among survey participants with 52% saying they check Facebook at least once per month vs. 60% in the spring.

80% of teens said they check Snapchat at least once per month, and 35% said it was their favorite social network.

In the report, Piper Jaffray cites the decline in Facebook engagement as "likely due to mix of younger teens, Messenger divergence, and shifting use cases for social."

Instagram usage among teens continues to steadily grow, although the report notes that young people "view Instagram's default public model as distinguished from Snapchat."

Snapchat, which is preparing for an early 2017 IPO at a $25 billion valuation, has over 150 million daily users globally. A 2015 Nielsen study found that the app reaches 41% of all 18 to 34 year-olds in the U.S. daily.

SEE ALSO: Snapchat makes you happier than Facebook, study finds

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Teens reveal their favorite apps and the winner is clear

Snapchat recently made a big change to how it plays back stories in its app.

You used to be able to tap the most recent story in your feed and watch all of them in a row. Each story autoplayed into the next and you could swipe past someone's story if you didn't feel like watching it.

But thanks to a recent update, you have to now select the stories you want to watch ahead of time if you want to watch them all at once. It's a handy feature if you want to only watch a few select peoples' stories, but it's annoying if you want to watch all of unwatched stories at once.

Luckily, there's still a way to autoplay all unread stories in Snapchat. Just tap the three dots at the bottom right of the screen and all of your unwatched stories will be selected for you:

SEE ALSO: Teens still love Snapchat more than Facebook, but Instagram isn't far behind

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here’s everything we know about Snapchat’s new camera sunglasses, Spectacles

Last summer, Evan Spiegel sat in a dimly lit room for four minutes, flipping through a notebook filled with drawings trying to explain what Snapchat is. 

"It's three screens: Snap, Chat, and Watch," he said about the app, four years after it launched. "And it's all about taking pictures and expressing yourself in the moment." 

For the people who never understood what Snapchat was in the first place, the video left people more confused than ever about what the company does. Internally, there were fears among some people that Snapchat wasn't doing a good job of explaining what it does or its future, sources say. Those fears only increased as Snapchat started prepping to go public. 

One year later, the newly renamed Snap Inc. doesn't need to put out a four-minute video to explain its mission.

It's able to express it in six words: "Snap Inc. is a camera company."

On the road to IPO

Snap Inc., the camera company, is a long-way from its root as Picaboo, a "don't call it sexting" app that started in a Stanford dorm room. The idea — unique at the time — was that you'd be able to send pictures and have them disappear after the recipient viewed them.

Picaboo renamed to Snapchat and its first press materials were images of girls in bikinis jumping around on the beach. When Nick Bilton wrote about the app in 2012, one of its first major press articles, the New York Times zeroed in on the sexting angle with the headline "Disruptions: Indiscreet Photos, Glimpsed then Gone."

Today, articles list Evan Spiegel after Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as tech visionaries. Going public, however, will test Spiegel's ability to communicate his vision for the company — and win over Wall Street with it.  

Old job listings for the company used to describe Snapchat as a way to communicate with friends, watch stories, and explore news. "In short, we are a passionate team working hard to build the best platform in the world for telling great stories," old job descriptions said.

Yet, the newly renamed Snap Inc. has been working to shed its image of another social network, like Twitter, that could fail to evolve past its core use. Instead of being called a platform, it's a now a camera company.

In September, that mission statement was swapped out for a new one, which appears in all new job listings: "We believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate."

It's not totally a hardware company yet

While Snap might call itself a camera company, it isn't looking to take down Nikon, but to free its users from relying on their smartphone camera to communicate what they're doing in that moment. 

"Our products empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together," continues the new boilerplate in job listings.

Its first foray into living in the moment is its soon-to-be-released Spectacles, a pair of smart sunglasses that can record 10 seconds. While many people were quick to compare it to Google Glass, one Snap employee told Business Insider that it's better to think of the glasses as a "GoPro for your face." 

Snap wants to untether people from their phones, capture what's around them, and invent a way to share their world naturally. And this isn't a new part of the company's mission — it's just the first time Snap has started to clearly express it. 

For as much criticism as Snapchat received for being a selfie app for narcissists, one of its core innovations was to open the app directly to the camera looking outward. It opens so you share your world, not just see what everyone else is doing.

Becoming a camera company just means its looking for different ways to capture it.

SEE ALSO: What it’s like to work at Snapchat, one of the most secretive companies in tech

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here’s everything we know about Snapchat’s new camera sunglasses, Spectacles

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Digital Media Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

Snap’s general manager in the UK, Claire Valoti, made her first public appearance last week at IAB’s Engage event in London equipped with some new demographic data on UK users, per the Drum.

The company announced that 77% of users in the UK are over the age of 18.

This is good because it means that most of Snapchat’s user base is a targetable audience. Advertisers are not permitted to use data to target users under the age of 18, meaning Snap can monetize a large majority of its user base in the UK. Consumers over 18 also have more purchasing power than younger teens, and advertisers want to see real ROI for their ad spend.

However, this could present a few hurdles for both marketers and Snap: 

• Snap’s younger audience may not be as large as advertisers perceive. This means that large, untargeted brand budgets could be allocated to platforms with bigger audiences.
• Advertisers still want to be on the radar of teenagers. Brands can influence teens who voluntarily follow them or the celebrities who endorse them.
• 43% of adult UK Snapchatters are parents. As was the case with Facebook, the infiltration of parents could drive teens to other, cooler platforms.

The company is increasingly focused on building out a robust UK presence as mobile and video ad spend continue to accelerate, according to the IAB. In addition, Snap has been reinforcing their UK presence for over a year now, poaching high-profile executives from Buzzfeed, Twitter and Facebook along the way, according to Business Insider.

• Snapchat has a strong foothold in the fastest growing ad format in the UK. For the first time in the UK, ad spend on mobile surpassed desktop ad spend in the first half of 2016. Video ad spend across mobile and desktop grew an impressive 67% YoY, while the mobile portion of that grew 129%. Video now accounts for 30% of digital display advertising, and 37% of mobile advertising.
• 50 million of Snap’s 150 daily active users are in Europe, according to AdWeek.  Snapchat opened its Ads API earlier this month, and although it is unclear when the API will launch in the UK, this could drive meaningful ad dollars to the platform. 

To receive stories like this one directly to your inbox every morning, sign up for the Digital Media Briefing newsletter. Click here to learn more about how you can gain risk-free access today.

Join the conversation about this story »

Facebook continues to broaden its test of a Snapchat-like redesign in the Messenger app.

The feature, which is called Messenger Day, mimics Snapchat's Story functionality by letting people candidly share photos and videos with colorful text and stickers that disappear after 24 hours.

Facebook gave people in Poland access to Messenger Day last month, and now the feature is available to Messenger users in Australia as well, as first spotted by Mashable.

"We know that people come to Messenger to share everyday moments with friends and family," a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider when asked about the test in Poland last month. "In Poland we are running a small test of new ways for people to share those updates visually."

When asked on Tuesday if the feature will be made available in more countries besides Poland and Australia, a spokesperson said "We have nothing more to announce at this time."

Facebook frequently tests new features with small percentages of its vast user base to gather feedback before deciding to make changes available broadly. So there's a chance that Messenger Day could never make it to countries like the United States.

On the other hand, Facebook expanding its test of the Snapchat look-a-like to another country could also be a sign that the test is going well.

SEE ALSO: Instagram is copying Snapchat's Stories with posts that disappear after 24 hours

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This hidden soccer game in Facebook Messenger will have you addicted in no time

Snapchat, the company now known as Snap, is planning to change the way it compensates the publishers that appear on the Discover content section, according to a report from Recode's Peter Kafka.

At the moment, the publishers who appear on Discover — which include BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan, Vice, and ESPN — enter into an advertising revenue share deal with Snap. Publishers can sell their own ads to appear against the content, or Snap's sales team can sell the ads and split the revenue.

Now, in a model more similar to the way TV distribution deals, Snap will instead pay an upfront license fee, according to the report.

Snap declined to comment on the report when contacted by Business Insider.

For many premium publishers, this will be seen as a positive step. It's a guaranteed windfall of cash and reverts back to a syndication model most content producers have used for decades.

Snap has publicly stated that 100 million of its users visit the Discover section every month, with the top-performing channels averaging view time of between 4 to 6 minutes. 

Sources told Business Insider that those top-performing channels average around 10 million monthly users a month — far fewer than the amount of visitors they get to their sites — so an upfront payment may be seen as preferential to a risky advertising revenue share that requires time investment for their sales teams.

Snap Discover content also requires specific skills from publishers to produce. The short-form content and vertical videos are Snap-specific, meaning editorial teams have to create original stories rather than simply transferring existing articles over from their sites. An upfront payment could be viewed as a better insurance policy for this hard work, rather than ad revenue that they may or may not be able to generate — not least after Snap redesigned the section, putting Stories from friends in a priority spot above publisher content.

Dominic Carter, chief commercial officer at News UK, which publishes The Sun — a Snap Discover partner — told Business Insider the change reflects Snap recognizing that professionally created quality journalism is of high value. 

But he added that the "Devil is always in the detail."

Carter said: "[The change] is a great opportunity for us to be clear that we are valued by platforms in a way that we historically haven't felt they have. The question is: Is it on good commercial terms?"

However, others may look at this move as Snap enforcing a ceiling on how much they can earn from their content. Some publishers may also want to lock down strict guidelines on the types of advertising and brands that can appear against their Discover content rather than letting Snap have full control.

Carter says that News UK always works to guidelines with distribution partners anyway and said it would be "daft" for Snap to do anything that would undermine its partners' brands.

As far as revenue ceilings are concerned, Carter said "I don't think you're signing up for life. You enter into it open-minded and do the deal that makes sense. No contracts are lifetime contracts, it's down to the detail. [Snap] is one of those platforms you know has a great audience and it's a great opportunity for us today and clearly for them too. At the moment you have to get advertisers used to the platform, with the formats they have got, and once they have it will take off. We know our content is well-viewed on there today, but it'll be interesting to look at it in five years time and then it'll just be a question of reshaping the contract."

The reported shift in strategy comes as Snap prepares to become a public company, with its IPO expected in 2017, according to numerous reports.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The story of Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the daughter Steve Jobs claimed wasn't his

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Digital Media Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

Snapchat wants to end ad-share deals with Discover media partners and instead pay publishers an upfront license fee for their content, Recode reports.

The company is discussing terms with its publishers now, with aims to introduce the new system next month. So far, the response from publishers has been mixed, and they are right to fret about what this deal could mean for them.

Snapchat’s proposal is akin to the deals between traditional TV broadcasters and producers, where networks pay studios upfront for film and TV content, and then keep all the ad revenue. This pivot represents a remarkable about-face from Snapchat’s early promise split ad revenue with publishers, and there are many ways to deconstruct and analyze the possible implications of this announcement:

• Gives Snapchat full control over its inventory. It’s understandable that Snapchat might want full control over its ads to accelerate revenue as it builds up for an IPO. This explains why Snapchat hadn't allowed publishers to sell ads when it premiered its API earlier this month. Preventing publishers from integrating with its API can act as a sort of divide–and-conquer tactic for Snapchat deal with third-parties on a piecemeal basis.
• Strips publishers of control over ads that run with their content. Snapchat might consult publishers on an ad hoc basis, but publishers probably won't be at the negotiating table for these ad deals. This limits the opportunities for publishers to earn revenue off Snapchat, and even carries brand equity risk if an unsuitable ad runs alongside their content. 
• Potentially disincentivizes quality content on Snapchat. Snapchat’s offering to publishers is not a fixed licensing fee and distribution. But will publisher's value distribution that’s unlinked from ad revenue? Distribution’s only tangible benefit now is from a brand-building perspective. It’s hard to tell whether this alone will be a sufficient incentive for publishers to produce quality content and grow their audience. 
• Guarantees publishers steady and fixed revenue. This security might be welcomed by publishers operating in the volatile world of digital advertising. This will encourage non-partnering media companies to secured a coveted spot as a Discover partner. Past experience suggests these companies relish upfront money too, as evidenced with Facebook Live. But being paid upfront means that publishers miss out on a valuable slice of Snapchat's ad revenue, which is expected to top $1 billion in 2017. 
• Makes publishers entirely dependent on Snapchat. This would be a terrible deal for publishers. Agreeing to Snapchat's terms would be tantamount to signing over a significant portion of their fate and ownership to the photo-sharing platform. By paying publishers directly, Snapchat can influence publishers to abide more strictly by its own terms.
• Potentially helps Snapchat to protect itself from rivals. At the same time, paying publishers directly could allow Snapchat to reap the benefits of content exclusivity. Tying publishers down to creating content only on its platform could be a massive differentiator for Snapchat versus rivals like Facebook, which are moving quickly to integrate Snapchat-like features into their platforms. 
• Highlights the perennial dangers facing  digital publishers. Those who tether their strategies to social platforms for broad distribution do so at an immense risk. On the other hand, focusing solely on building out their own properties without consideration to social platforms is also a dangerous strategy.

To receive stories like this one directly to your inbox every morning, sign up for the Digital Media Briefing newsletter.Click here to learn more about how you can gain risk-free access today.

Join the conversation about this story »

Snapchat says it’s now a camera company — with its forthcoming camera-glasses and its hundreds of millions of smartphone-bearing teen devotees reinventing the way we take photos.

But the company is also quietly taking steps to replace another iconic consumer device: the television.

The maker of the popular social networking app wants to fill its online service with a slate of original video programming that ranges from breaking news to entertainment and reality shows.

Job listings posted for its parent company, Snap Inc., indicate that the company is looking to hire development managers for its "original shows", a role that entails reviewing pilots, pitching show ideas, and working with producers. Talent agents have started circulating Snapchat’s name as an active buyer of original programming.

And Snap sees itself becoming the “de facto news outlet” for its millennial audience, according to a source familiar with the company's plans.

It’s an ambitious move that Snapchat has attempted before in a more limited manner. But with billions of television ad dollars at stake and plans for a $25 billion IPO underway, Snapchat is determined to evolve from a platform where teens trade selfies into the media powerhouse that reinvents must-see TV for the phone-first generation.

TV designed for your phone

Snapchat has been laying the groundwork for a bigger push into TV for awhile.

In 2015, the company had created its own in-house content team run by a former Fox exec and launched a music channel, called "Under the Ghost." Both efforts were shut down as Snapchat regrouped on its content strategy and laid off a lot of the team behind it.

A year later, Snapchat's ever-changing content strategy is focused on partnering with networks to develop entertainment programming, while leaving some of the news coverage to Snapchat's editorial judgment, according to the source with knowledge of the plans.

In August, the company announced it had partnered with NBC to develop Snapchat-specific episodes of some of its hit shows, including "The Voice", "Saturday Night Live", and "The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon." It was a process that took two years to court the network and develop the show ideas, according to Mashable.

Snap is also hiring development managers both in Los Angeles and New York to "oversee the development and production of scripted and unscripted programming — from pitch to pilot.” The development managers are not only supposed to represent Snapchat when working with external producers and media partners, but also generate their own ideas for new shows and field pitches from the outside producers.

To attract external producers and artists to the app, Snapchat is also now being included in coverage updates from lead talent agencies like CAA and WME, according to Digiday, which first reported Snapchat’s inclusion on the updates in early October. The coverage updates from talent agencies normally list who is looking to buy content, from your traditional TV networks to new companies like YouTube and Netflix. 

According to Digiday's Sahil Patel, who viewed WME's coverage update, Snapchat is specifically looking for shows in the six to eight minute range — "everything from competition/reality shows like 'Survivor' to prank series like 'Punk’d' and even animated and sketch comedy shows." Still, unlike Netflix, which came in with a big budget and a willingness to spend it, Snapchat isn't spending at the same level or as aggressively.

That could always change though. According to one source, Snapchat is set on creating a "mobile TV" or programs designed superficially for an attention-short, vertical-video-watching audience. The company has already pressured some of its Discover partners, like MTV, to develop Snapchat specific shows. On Sunday, a PBS documentary series, POV, will debut its first of two six-minute documentaries shot for Snapchat. 

Next up: news

The other key to Snapchat owning mobile TV is becoming the news outlet of choice for the millennial audience, turning traditional news "on its head" says the source familiar with the plans. 

Snapchat has been crafting stories from live events for a few years, but they've been largely entertainment focused, like scenes from Coachella or behind-the-scenes at the Super Bowl. That's changed though as the company has poached more media veterans like CNN's Peter Hamby, who leads the Good Luck America show on Snapchat. 

While Snapchat has plenty of news partners in its Discover section, it's digging deeper on covering its own breaking news, using its ability to gather multiple viewpoints to its advantage.

Earlier this week, Snapchat broadcasted a news story from the front lines of the attack on ISIS in Mosul, piecing together multiple viewpoints on the ground from an ABC news correspondent to Iraqi citizens to views from the humanitarian camps in its partnership with the United Nations. 

In an interview with Mashable's Kerry Flynn about the Mosul video, Snap's head of original content Sean Mills said that its push into breaking news isn't met to upstage its Discover partners but to show a different point of view and complement the traditional media.

"For us, it’s less about giving people information and facts in a traditional third-person way and much more about bringing people into a news event first-person," Mills told Mashable.

The "Sully" moment

Snap's biggest advantage may be that it doesn't own one camera with a TV anchor in front of it, but that it can gather the views from cameras all of the world for an event.

The potential of all those viewpoints, for news and entertainment, is enormous. Nearly 10 million people in the US watched Snapchat's Live Story on Hurricane Matthew as it hammered the east coast. But Snap is still waiting for the defining moment that makes its advantage over the television screen crystal clear and undeniable.

When Captain Chelsey Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger landed an Airbus airplane on New York's' Hudson river in 2009, the photo spread instantaneously on Twitter, and Twitter's usefulness for news junkies became obvious.

It's still unclear what Snap's "Sully" moment will be. Right now, only 17% of Snapchat users get the news from the app, according to the Pew Research Center.

But Snapchat is taking the steps it thinks it needs, like focusing deeper on global news events versus only local stories, to grow into a media destination.

Between the breaking news from the Snap team, the new wave of shows from its Discover partners, and its outreach to Hollywood for more original content, Snapchat is amassing the variety of shows it needs to truly become the mobile TV for millennials.

SEE ALSO: What it’s like to work at Snapchat, one of the most secretive companies in tech

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here’s everything we know about Snapchat’s new camera sunglasses, Spectacles

As all good Snapchat users know, the app’s lenses are nothing short of extraordinary.

With just a tap of the screen, Snapchat will transform your selfie into something instantly hotter, cuter, wittier. You train the camera on yourself, activate the lens feature, and you’re suddenly adorable, with puppy ears and puppy nose.

Swipe, and waterfalls burst from your eyes. Tap again and you’re sporting an on-trend floral crown.

Snapchat flung open the floodgates of nonverbal communication when it launched lenses in September of 2015.

And the selfie was freed from the shackles of conventional beauty: Hello friend. Do you like my goat face?

The company then promptly figured out how to wring millions of dollars out of its lenses, inviting brands to customize the popular feature creatively.

In the year since sponsored lenses launched, the company’s revenue has skyrocketed. It is projected to reach $1 billion in 2017, up from $50 million in 2015.

Snapchat started out as the anti-Facebook.

Its vanishing messages were a breath of fresh air in an increasingly claustrophobic internet where one’s online presence was forever preserved. But the Snapchat of today is a different company.

In the brief year since sponsored lenses launched, the cult of the barfing rainbow has become nothing less than the new king of advertising.

From the beginning, Snapchat sought to distinguish its efforts at moneymaking from the data-hoarding operations of Google and Facebook, whose collecting and selling of personal information discomfited and alienated users.

In an October 17, 2014 blog post announcing that advertising was coming to the platform, Snapchat wrote:

We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication — things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.

Snapchat threw a few different options into the app in its initial attempt to make money.

First it rolled out conventional video ads that could just as easily have run on Facebook or Youtube.
It also experimented with making users pay for features, such as charging people for the option to replay their snaps—but users weren’t into it. In addition, Snapchat tried to launch a “Lens Store,” in which users could pay 99 cents to permanently save their favorite lenses.

That was another dud, and the company shut down the virtual shop three months after it opened.

By far the most innovative offering was sponsored lenses: ad campaigns in which brands pay to push customized lenses onto users’ photos.

Whenever a person took a selfie and swiped through the lenses available that day, he or she would easily discover the branded ones mixed in.

That prominence came with a hefty price tag, reportedly costing advertisers anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000 for a single day.

The first sponsored lens premiered on Halloween of last year.

Commissioned by 20th Century Fox to promote The Peanuts Movie, the lens allowed users to take a selfie with Snoopy or puke candy corn. A branded logo would appear in the corner of the snap. Users loved it, and the movie grossed $44 million its opening weekend, coming in second at the box office.

Snapchat is betting that the key to sponsored lenses’ success is that they are designed in-house, by the same team of people that works on the regular lenses.

Brand representatives describe their goals to Snapchat and leave the rest of the work to the social network’s internal labs. All lenses obey the same crowd-pleasing guidelines, and only the presence of a brand’s logo distinguishes commercial content.

No other mainstream ad product has convinced people to reliably, voluntarily brand themselves, and then organically spread photos of their branded selves through their networks.

It’s like wearing a sweatshirt with nothing but the word “Nike” on it —except in this case, the brand is something like Taco Bell, and the sweatshirt is your whole face, remade as a giant taco. A Snapchat representative called it an incredible recommendation to receive a branded image from a friend.

The project could easily have flopped, as users can turn against new forms of advertising. For example, in 2012 Facebook became mired in controversy when users discovered their likenesses showing up in Facebook ads. Users’ comments on the site were getting converted into ad content that Facebook then served to their friends.

The practice was technically legal, but users were caught by surprise and reacted negatively. That ad strategy wasn’t voluntary, and it definitely wasn’t fun.

Snapchat has now run more than 100 sponsored lens campaigns promoting a diverse array of brands.

Film and television studios including Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, and Pixar have been among the most prolific, using the lenses to goose ticket sales and ratings. Companies such as Michael Kors, Starbucks, Gatorade, and L’Oréal have also embraced lenses.

One of the most popular campaigns so far was also one of the most idiosyncratic — the aforementioned Taco Bell Cinco de Mayo campaign.

It went viral, making taco heads briefly ubiquitous.

The lens was viewed a staggering 224 million times, and nearly half of the Snapchatters who played with the lens shared snaps of their taco selves with their friends on the app.The elixir of interactivity mixed with vanity has created an unprecedented moment for advertisers.

“We are targeting the global teen,” said Michael Scheiner, VP of marketing of Hollister, which has run two sponsored lens campaigns. “We know the teen consumer is spending a lot of time on Snapchat and this is such a great way to reach them,” he said. “This is what the consumer is doing. They are sharing these lenses; they are interacting with these lenses. It’s something that they enjoy.”

In June, Benefit Cosmetics ran a sponsored lens tied to the launch of a suite of eyebrow products. When a user raised his or her eyebrows, a Benefit pencil would appear and beef up the person’s brows.

Benefit considered the lens an ideal fit for their product, as eyebrows are about an “instant and updated look, and that’s what you get with a Snapchat lens,” said Nicole Frusci, vice president of digital marketing at Benefit. The company was happy with the end result, but does not currently have plans to do more with lenses, “because they are so costly,” Frusci said.

The high price tag is a testament to lenses’ impact. Sponsored lenses cost more than double what a Facebook ad does to reach the same number of eyeballs, according to Jeremy Leon of the digital advertising firm Laundry Service, which did research on Snapchat’s ad products.

On the surface lenses are “seemingly less efficient,” Leon said.

But views don’t tell the whole story. Snapchat has partnered with several analytics firms to gauge the performance of their various advertising offerings. Lenses stick in users’ minds—and generate more positive brand impressions as well as greater purchasing intent—compared to other types of ads across social media, according to research by Millward Brown.

“People are smart enough now to know when they are being marketed to, so they won’t react kindly if you don’t add to their experience,” Leon said. Lenses are different for one simple reason: They’re “exceptionally fun.”

This fall Snapchat announced it had adopted targeted advertising, tracking users’ data to personalize the brand messages beamed at them—seemingly going back on its professed aversion to “creepy” marketing.

Snapchat told me that it performs some targeting of its lenses to make sure that alcohol-branded lenses only show up for users who are over 21 years old. It’s not a huge leap to imagine that Snapchat’s data gathering will lead to more.

You can expect to see Snapchat continue to milk its advertising opportunities as rumors of an IPO swirl. Just this week, Recode reported that Snapchat plans to change its agreements with publishers contributing to its Discover platform.

Now, instead of sharing revenue from advertising, Snapchat will pay publishers a flat fee and pocket all the ad money itself. It’s a loud vote of self-confidence in its own marketing mojo.

As sponsored lenses reveal, Snapchat has earned it.

Thanks to Sandra Upson.

More from Backchannel:

This is the smartest thing Facebook ever did

Proof the internet really has changed everything.

Instagram is ruining vacation

Do startups have a drinking problem?

SEE ALSO: What I saw inside Apple's top secret input lab

Join the conversation about this story »

Snapchat's parent company, Snap Inc., is aiming to raise "as much as $4 billion" when it goes public early next year, according to a Wednesday report from Bloomberg's Alex Barinka and Sarah Frier.

A source previously told Business Insider that Snap plans to go public by late March at around a $25 billion valuation, but now Bloomberg is saying that number could swell as high as $35 billion or even $40 billion.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will lead the deal, while JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Allen & Co., Barclays, and Credit Suisse will be joint bookrunners.

The Los Angeles-based company last raised $1.81 billion in private funding in May, which pegged its valuation at between $18 billion and $22 billion.

Raising $4 billion on the public market would put Snap well behind Facebook's $16 billion IPO raise in 2012 and ahead of Twitter's $1.82 billion in 2013.

Snap has told investors that it expects to make between $250 million and $350 million in advertising revenue this year. A recent eMarketer report predicted the company would near $1 billion in revenue in 2017 — meaning an IPO that valued the company at $35 billion would be 35 times its projected revenue numbers.

By comparison, Facebook was estimated to make $5 billion in ad revenue the same year it went public at a $104 billion valuation.

With annual revenue under $1 billion now, Snap could file its Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission under the JOBS Act. In such a scenario, the initial filing would be confidential.

Snap wasn't immediately available to comment.

SEE ALSO: Meet the secret power players who run Snapchat

AND ALSO: What it's like to work at Snapchat, one of the most secretive tech companies

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here’s everything we know about Snapchat’s new camera sunglasses, Spectacles

Facebook is taking another page out of Snapchat's playbook.

On Thursday the social network announced selfie filters for live video, which will initially be themed for Halloween. The new feature will be available in Facebook's iPhone app in the U.S., U.K., and New Zealand and eventually come to Android.

The selfie filters, which Facebook is calling Live Masks, use augmented reality to turn you into things like a skull or pumpkin. They of course look very similar to Snapchat's Lenses, which have become a meaningful source of revenue for the growing app through sponsorship deals with companies like Taco Bell.

Facebook bought the app MSQRD earlier this year to power its selfie masks, although this is the first time the company has incorporated MSQRD's tech into the main Facebook app.

Adding goofy filters to live video is likely intended to encourage normal people to stream on Facebook. Media outlets and celebrities are paid to share live video on Facebook, but broadcasting live lacks the casualness that apps like Snapchat provide.

Expect to see more camera-related updates to Facebook in the coming weeks. Facebook head of product Chris Cox recently said that the company is "very invested” in making the camera “a creative tool."

“It’s an area of work we’re really invested in, which is making it easy for the camera to be an early application of AR," he said at the Wall Street Journal's tech conference in California earlier this week.

One update Facebook has already teased is the ability to add artistic, Prisma-like filters to live video that mimic the styles of famous paintings. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demoed the feature on Wednesday and said it would be available "soon."

SEE ALSO: Facebook is letting more people use its Snapchat clone in Messenger

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This is how you're compromising your identity on Facebook

Facebook's full assault on Snapchat has begun.

On Friday, Facebook announced a completely revamped camera interface in its main app that can send goofy selfies that disappear after 24 hours.

The test, which Facebook simply calls "the new camera," is first being made available in Ireland before rolling out to everyone.

Like Snapchat, Facebook's new camera includes dozens of special effects including augmented-reality selfie "masks" that seem almost identical to Snapchat's Lenses. A camera button at the top of the News Feed will open the new interface, and swiping to the right of the News Feed will show photo and video direct messages with friends.

This particular camera redesign has been of personal interest to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to someone familiar with his thinking. He shared a new mantra, "the camera is the composer," during an all-hands meeting with Facebook employees this summer, the person said.

A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider on Friday that the new camera design was in response to two trends the company observed: People are sharing more photos and videos than ever before, and they want a way to share them with only close friends, not their entire friend demographic.

Chris Cox, Facebook's product chief, said earlier this week at The Wall Street Journal's tech conference that his team is "very invested" in making the camera "a creative tool."

"It's an area of work we're really invested in, which is making it easy for the camera to be an early application of AR," he said.

Facebook started wading into Snapchat's territory went it bought the selfie filter app Masquerade, known as MSQRD, earlier this year. Then Instagram introduced a clone of Snapchat's Story functionality; Facebook is currently testing a similar feature in the Messenger app in parts of Europe and Australia.

SEE ALSO: Facebook's new selfie filters for live video look like Snapchat too

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Teens reveal their favorite apps and the winner is clear

If you can't buy them, copy them.

That's the approach Facebook seems to have decided on for Snapchat, the fast-growing app Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy in 2013 for around $3 billion, and which is now planning an IPO that could value it as highly as $40 billion.

Now Zuckerberg has a new mantra for the future of sharing on Facebook that's directly inspired by Snapchat: "the camera is the composer."

Zuckerberg shared the battle cry during an all-hands meeting with Facebook employees over the summer, according to someone familiar with the meeting. Since then, Facebook has rolled out a number of features that can best be described as Snapchat clones— the most obvious being Facebook-owned Instagram's Stories feature.

Facebook internally refers to the box above the News Feed where you can share a new status as the "composer." That box hasn't changed much over the past decade, but expect it to as Facebook keeps making the camera a more prominent part of its experience. 

"The new camera"

On Friday, Facebook announced a completely revamped camera interface in its main app that sends goofy selfies that disappear after 24 hours.

The test, which it simply calls "the new camera," is first being made available in Ireland before rolling out to everyone.

A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider on Friday that the new camera design was in response to two trends the company observed: People are sharing more photos and videos than ever before, and they want a way to share them with only close friends, not their entire friend demographic.

Both trends have been happening on Snapchat for years.

Chris Cox, Facebook's product chief, shed more light on Facebook's camera focus earlier this week at The Wall Street Journal's tech conference.

"It's an area of work we're really invested in, which is making it easy for the camera to be an early application of AR," he said. 

He then demoed one of Facebooks' new "reactive" filters for live video that replicates the styles of famous paintings. Zuckerberg later shared another demo on his Facebook page.

Snapchat has always been an incredibly visual social network — people primarily use it to share mundane or silly photos that disappear after they're viewed. 

Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel has regularly stated that his app opens to the camera by default to encourage people to share and be creative. Snapchat has already rebranded itself to Snap Inc., "the camera company," as it prepares for its IPO. 

Facebook may have missed its chance on owning the camera company, but it hasn't given up on being the camera.

SEE ALSO: Teens still love Snapchat more than Facebook, but Instagram isn't far behind

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to stop Facebook's ads from following you all over the internet

Snapchat allows users to create their own geofilters for as little as $5. Here's how the submission process works.

Follow BI Video: On Twitter

Join the conversation about this story »

It's fairly normal to get asked in a job interview about a time you failed and had to overcome a weakness.

The focus on weaknesses, however, isn't always the best way to find a candidate for a job, according to the Oxegen Consulting team founded by early Facebook HR execs, Sara Sperling and Stuart Crabb. 

Sperling says the better question to ask instead is "When do you get lost in what you're doing?"

Instead of highlighting an individual's weakness, asking what a person can get lost in for hours identifies their strengths — not only just what they're good at, but what they're emotionally invested in as well.

It's a shift of mind, but a powerful one that's been a secret to Facebook's success, the pair said.

Building Facebook's strength-based culture

In the early days of Facebook, when it was only a few hundred people, the company decided to center its culture around building its employee's strengths and letting people's skill shine to their advantage.

Employees don't need to be masters of all disciplines. Instead, Facebook hires for positions knowing the strengths of those roles and looking for employees to fill them. If an interviewee says they get lost spending hours coding on a project they're excited about, then they might be a coding machine. If they lose track of time while brainstorming new ideas on a whiteboard and feed off of others suggestions, then they might be a collaborative product manager.

Plenty of companies like to say they cater to their employees strengths, but the instinct to fix weak spots rather than capitalize on strengths is not easy to overcome.

“There’s a complete captivation with weaknesses," Crabb told Business Insider. 

Failing with straight As

Sperling think the mentality is hard-coded in people thanks to their days in school where everyone was encouraged to get straight A's. A math major in college, she knew she was never going to be a good writer, but she had to devote a lot of her time to improving her writing skills to get the grades.

"Why do we expect our employees to be A students?" Sperling said.

For employees, you might be able to coach someone on public speaking skills so they don't throw up before every presentation, but it won't make them a natural-born speaker who loves commanding the stage.

"You can remediate a weakness, but you can’t remediate it by turning it into a strength," Crabb said.

Instead, a company's resources are better spent on pushing people to improve what they already love doing. When Sperling was at Facebook, for example, it was Crabb who told her that if she loved getting up in front of people and leading crowds that she should take improv classes to further her public speaking skills. 

The key is unlocking whatever it is that an employee has an emotional connection to and directing that energy towards their work. 

"Strength has an emotional connection to it," Sperling said. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could intersect that emotion with the needs of a business?"

SEE ALSO: 20 women Silicon Valley tech companies should be adding to their boards

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Unorthodox questions you may have to answer if you want to work at Chipotle

Snapchat wants to go public in the first half of 2017. Its valuation, Bloomberg reports, could be up to $40 billion.

If you consider Snapchat's business today, that seems ludicrous.

Snapchat, which recently changed its corporate name to Snap Inc., will reportedly generate about $300 million in 2016, up from roughly $50 million last year. Even if you believe Snap can generate $1 billion to $2 billion in 2017 — its rumored projection — a $40 billion initial public offering would give the company a hard-t0-justify 40X multiple.

Its ad offerings and technology are relatively early days, compared with peers such as Google and Facebook, and TV ads — which Snap likely wants to compete against — are still generally priced much higher than online video units.

Facebook, by comparison, is expected to generate about $27 billion this year. And although it boasts a massive $370 billion market cap, Facebook's stock is trading at only 10 times as much as next year's projected revenue.

For many investors, that's reason enough to dismiss Snap.

But if you ignore the numbers for a minute and look at Snap's product and leadership track record, it becomes much tougher to write the company off as an overhyped flash in the pan. If Snap's impact on the tech industry over the next five years is as profound as it was in the past five, then some of the heated expectations around the company might not be so outlandish.

Evan Spiegel is considered a product 'Picasso'

Spiegel isn't a technical founder — someone who writes lines of code — like Google's Larry Page or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. And his company doesn't make decisions based on data, ignoring a fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley's engineering-driven companies.

Instead, Snap operates more like a creative shop where Spiegel obsesses over the product. As one person who has worked there explained, if you imagined a movie director starting a company, with artists flowing in and out, that's what Snap's office vibe is like.

Spiegel's emulation of Steve Jobs has been much talked about, with the 26-year-old Snap CEO sharing the late Apple founder's passion for showmanship, secrecy, and suspense when it comes to creating products.

But Spiegel isn't just another Jobs imitator. He has proved multiple times that he can invent hit products that set industry trends. And like Jobs, he has some fiercely loyal followers who believe he's the real deal.

"Admirers say Spiegel is as good at building products as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs,"Recode's Kurt Wagner wrote. "And if you think that's hyperbole, you should talk to several of the sources we spoke to for this story, who casually likened him to Picasso."

Radical-sounding ideas that have proved to be right

Throughout Snap's five-year history, Spiegel has made a series of decisions that seemed crazy at first, but proved to be right. Consider:

• Before Snap, the internet was permanent. Every tweet, message, or photo was documented forever on sites such as Google and Facebook — even the unflattering ones. Snap single-handedly blew that up, introducing the notion of ephemerality. Whether it's teens regularly culling their Instagram accounts of posts that are more than a week old, or the bevy of messaging apps designed for self-destructing communication, Snap's idea is now increasingly the norm.
• Snap popularized vertical video, a format that makes much more sense on phones. Horizontal video, the so-called landscape mode that you watch TV shows and movies in, was the undisputed standard for video until Snap came along. Now a growing number of publishers, advertisers, and even online video rivals like YouTube have latched on to videos that are shot vertically.
• Turning down a roughly $4 billion acquisition offer from Facebook turned out to be smart. It's not easy to refuse an offer from Mark Zuckerberg — just ask the founders of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus — especially when the offer is multiple billions of dollars. But three years later, Spiegel's company is already worth about five times Facebook's offering price, and if it IPOs at $40 billion, Snap will be worth 10 times that.
• He's rethinking the shape of photos and videos from squares to circles. The idea has yet to be proved, but Spiegel's logic is sound. For Snap's Spectacles sunglasses, "the video it records is circular, more like human vision,"The Wall Street Journal's Seth Stevenson wrote. "Spiegel argues that rectangles are an unnecessary vestige of printing photos on sheets of paper."

Snap doesn't have just one hit product — it has at least 6

When Snap launched, it looked like a fad. It was considered a sexting tool for college students that made lewd photos disappear. But a lot of red-hot apps that fail to keep innovating die shortly after launch: Yo, Ello, Meerkat, even Pokémon Go quickly lost its cool.

Instead of riding out its one smash hit, Snap launched a series of new products that kept users sticking around:

• Snaps. In 2010, Snap launched its flagship feature: disappearing photo and video messages. Now more than 1 billion snaps are viewed every day. Video views on Snapchat have grown more than 350% in the last year, to more than 10 billion daily views.
• Stories. In October 2013, Snap allowed users to create strings of photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours, called Stories. Stories are now viewed by 10 million to 20 million users a day.
• Discover.Snap launched Discover, a section for media publications to post articles, in January 2015. Now 100 million users view it every month. That's vastly lower than the number of people who are snapping back and forth each day, so you could argue Discover isn't a hit. But it accomplished an important goal for Snap: It infatuated the media. This worked for Facebook when it began driving traffic to publishers from its news feed. Zuckerberg had reportedly been upset that journalists were infatuated with Twitter. So BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti apparently advised him to "show them how much traffic you can drive. ... That will cure the journalists of their attachment to Twitter, and get better press for Facebook."
• Filters. They launched in December 2014, and users now view snaps with geofilters more than 1 billion times a day.
• Lenses and Messaging are also popular on Snapchat. Even sponsored lenses that Snap makes money from are getting a decent amount of user interaction. For example, Taco Bell's Cinco de Mayo taco-face selfie lens was viewed 224 million times.

Of course, not everything Snap has launched has taken off. For example, Snap tried SnapCash, a service similar to the payments app Venmo, and a few in-app payment features that never went mainstream. But the company had enough hits to prove it's no one-trick pony.

"One of the company's great attributes is their willingness to put out a lot of product," Snap investor Mitch Lasky told Recode. "Evan's got a lot of interesting ideas and he's absolutely fearless about putting them out there. If they don't work, so be it."

Facebook's paranoia

A major indicator of Snap's potential upside is Facebook's reaction to it. At first, things were cordial.

Zuckerberg emailed Spiegel in November 2012 to say he was a fan of his app.

Within weeks of meeting Spiegel and his cofounder, Bobby Murphy, Zuckerberg launched a near clone of Snapchat, called Poke. The app failed shortly after it launched.

One year later, reports surfaced that Facebook had made an offer to purchase Snap for billions of dollars, but Snap declined. Since then, Facebook has launched more than half a dozen apps and features that resemble Snapchat.

The Verge put together a timeline of Facebook trying to copy Snap. It lists eight total instances, excluding the most recent cloning examples — such as Facebook's August launch of Instagram Stories, which mimics Snap's Stories features down to its name, and Live Masks, Snapchat-like face filters that Facebook announced in October.

Snap seems to be the only real thorn in Facebook's side, catering to a younger audience of teens and 20-somethings that Facebook would love to have. And Facebook has a history of waging war on any product it deems a threat.

For example, when Google launched its social media platform, Google Plus, Zuckerberg called an all-hands meeting and put the company on "lockdown," with employees encouraged to work around the clock to defeat the competition.

"You know, one of my favorite Roman orators ended every speech with the phrase 'Carthago delenda est' — 'Carthage must be destroyed,'"Zuckerberg told employees. "For some reason I think of that now."

How Snap looks compared with Twitter and Facebook

Based on some of the data we have about Snap (the company has not yet publicly filed its prospectus), it's fair to say Snap isn't in the same league as Facebook was at the time of its IPO — though Snap is seeking a valuation of less than half of Facebook's.

If Snap were to go public today, it would have significantly fewer users than the 900 million monthly actives Facebook had at its IPO. It would also have about one-tenth of Facebook's revenue — roughly $350 million versus Facebook's $3 billion to $4 billion.

Facebook ended its first day of trading with a $104 billion market cap, about 26 times as much as its revenue. Although Facebook's value was cut in half four months later, it rebounded to its IPO price once the company mastered mobile monetization. (Facebook generated almost no mobile revenue when it went public.)

But Snap is only five years old, and Facebook was eight when it was listed. When Facebook was Snap's age, though, it was generating roughly $650 million, about double that of Snap.

If you compare Snap and Twitter, things look a little rosier.

Twitter was seven when it went public, and had about the same number of active users then — about 230 million per month — as Snap likely has now. Snap has already passed Twitter in terms of daily active users, according to Bloomberg. Twitter had about 100 million daily active users when it went public. It generated about $665 million in 2013, less than Snap is hoping to make in its sixth year.

Twitter's stock has been getting hammered lately on reports of layoffs, stalled growth, and lack of acquisition interest. The $27 billion market cap it had in 2013 has been sliced to about $12 billion today. And Twitter still has not managed to turn a profit.

What will Snap become?

Can Snap become a behemoth the size of Facebook or Google with more than 1 billion users? If so, then a $40 billion valuation isn't outrageous.

Or will it become Twitter, which tried to chase Facebook's scale but never quite nailed the experience for the masses?

Snap, like Twitter, isn't easy for non-millennials to immediately grasp. And Snap will need to attract older audiences if it wants to keep growing.

Snap could also become something else entirely — a $20 billion messaging app like WhatsApp, a $15 billion media company like Viacom, or a camera company like the much smaller $1.4 billion GoPro.

Those are a lot of unknowns for public investors. But because the company is young, there could also be significant potential upside, and Spiegel has consistently proved that he isn't someone to underestimate.

"When Snap started out, I thought it seemed trivial. I was completely wrong," Chamath Palihapitiya, a startup investor who hasn't invested in Snap, told Bloomberg.

"I don't think anyone saw coming what they are building."

SEE ALSO: What it’s like to work at Snapchat, one of the most secretive companies in tech

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The story of Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the daughter Steve Jobs claimed wasn't his

Two of the founders behind ill-fated Vine are back with a quirky new app for live video called Hype. And they've already managed to attract the backing of Snapchat's first investor: Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Ventures.

Co-founders Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov say they want to bring the same caliber of video editing tools from the professional TV world to mobile video, the latter of which has "remained relatively simple and one-dimensional."

The Hype app, which is available now in the App Store, is anything but simple and one-dimensional. It can be best described as a mix of Twitter-owned Periscope and Snapchat — with an extra dose of weird.

Like other live streaming apps, you create broadcasts for people to watch and comment on in real time. Where Hype differs is in all of the creative editing tools it offers, like the ability to show GIFs, webpages, feature viewer comments onscreen, play background music, and bring in other people for dual broadcasts.

Hype's cofounders say beta testers have used the app to host daily news shows and review video games. Kroll and Yusupov have been working on the app for the past year with a small team in New York City.

"This isn’t just about porting TV genres to mobile video," Liew, who led Hype's first round of funding, said in a Medium post on Wednesday. "It is about creating new genres, native to the mobile native format and to the mobile-native audience."

Or as Yusupov put it during a Hype broadcast on Wednesday, "We're blending the lines between the host and the audience. You become the content."

SEE ALSO: This is what Snapchat's first investor looks for in the next big app

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: We asked people what they thought of Vine, and 6 months after it was released they already had doubts about its longevity

When it released in 1997, "Starship Troopers" had pretty much everything you could want from a satirical science-fiction action flick.

There's the over-the-top action and the cheesy dialogue with gems like, "The only good bug is a dead bug!"

Now it seems that Hollywood is looking to recapture that magic by rebooting the movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The original studio has selected the writing pair behind the new Baywatch movie, Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, to write the script. The Hollywood Reporter says this could "relaunch a potential franchise."

But what would a new Starship Troopers movie look like?

One thing that's good to note is that some of the technology that appeared in the original film is actually we have today — though other things, like faster-than-light space travel, still elude us. And "Starship Troopers" predicted it all the way back in 1997, before the internet changed our lives.

Read on to see what "Starship Troopers" totally nailed about today's tech:

All of the students in Starship Troopers use tablet computers (though they're still as thick as tech from the '90s).

Based on the stylus, it looks like the Surface Pro beats the iPad in the Starship Troopers universe — though Apple has come around to the stylus with the its Apple Pencil.

With fingerprint scanners becoming the standard on phones, it's pretty clear that Starship Troopers was right when it assumed we wouldn't be using passwords to sign into our computers in the future.