Snap is still flying above its initial public offering price, even though the Snapchat maker doesn't have a single "buy" rating from Wall Street analysts.

After Snap's IPO on Thursday, the stock jumped 44% in a day and has continued to climb, moving up another 4% on Monday morning. (Update: Snap moved down 7% later in the morning.)

But that doesn't mean Wall Street analysts are loving it.

On Monday morning, Bespoke Investing Group noted that Snap is the only "US stock with a $20+ [billion] mkt cap that has ZERO buy recommendations."

CNBC put together a short list of analysts that have weighed in so far, and it includes five sells and two holds:

• Needham: underperform (sell)
• Atlantic Equities: underweight (sell)
• Morningstar: sell
• Aegis: hold
• Susquehanna: hold
• Nomura Instinet: reduce (sell)
• Pivotal Research: sell

Although Snap doesn't have any "buy" ratings yet, it's currently being covered by a relatively limited set of analysts. Some of the big Wall Street research firms also served as underwriters on the Snap IPO, which means they have to wait several weeks before they can publicly talk about Snap.

But still, why is everyone so wary?

Anthony DiClemente at Nomura Instinet has a good summary of the reasons to be skeptical.

"Snap Inc. is becoming a public company just as its user growth and monetization growth rates are beginning to meaningfully slow," he wrote.

He wrote that upside in shares is limited by these four things:

1. "Already slowing growth in daily active users (DAUs)."
2. "Slowing monetization (ARPU) growth."
3. "Fierce competition from larger rivals such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp."
4. "Rich valuation relative to current and future growth."

In other words, buyer beware.

So how is Snap telling its investors it can make money eventually? Indications are that Snap doesn't expect to gain the gargantuan scale of Facebook, but rather create a premium product to wring out more money per user.

One big way Snap thinks it can do this is by grabbing TV ad budgets, a goal shared by digital giants like YouTube and Facebook. This money has been slow to move from TV to digital video, but Snap thinks it's in the best position when that accelerates. That's because Snap considers ads on Snapchat superior to those on television and way better than those on other digital-video competitors, according to Snap's S-1 filing.

See Business Insider's full explanation of Snap's argument »

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A group representing large institutional investors has approached stock index providers S&P Dow Jones Indices and MSCI Inc, looking to bar Snap Inc and any other company that sells investors non-voting shares from their stock benchmarks.

Both index providers have said they are reviewing Snap's inclusion. Were Snap to be added to indexes such as the S&P 500 Index or the MSCI USA Index, then managers of stock index portfolios will have to buy its shares and other investors, whose performance is tracked against such indexes, would likely follow suit.

Some big money managers worry about buying Snap’s Class A shares because they have no voting rights, meaning shareholders will have no voice on matters like the company’s future strategy or the pay of its executives.

"They're tapping public markets but giving shareholders no say," said Amy Borrus, deputy director of the Council of Institutional Investors, which represents big pension funds and other large asset owners, in an interview.

In reaching out to both index providers, she said, "What we would like to see at the least is for the indexes to exclude new no-vote companies." Meetings with both index providers are scheduled this week, she said.

David Blitzer, managing director of S&P Dow Jones Indices and chair of a committee overseeing its indexes, said they would not add a new stock like Snap for 6 to 12 months after its IPO in any case, and will use the time to study Snap's structure.

While the index provider does not have a hard requirement about a company's voting structure, the committee needs to think through how much influence investors should have, Blitzer said in an interview on Monday.

" 'Who Votes?' is the issue right now," he said.

MSCI said on March 2 that Snap would qualify for indexes including the MSCI USA Index but then said on March 3 that after additional analysis Snap did not meet all requirements. Snap's inclusion into the MSCI USA Index will be re-assessed in May, MSCI said in a statement on its website.

MSCI is seeking feedback from investors about whether companies without voting rights should be included in indexes, according to the March 3 statement. A spokesman did not immediately provide further details.

A spokesman for Snap declined to comment.

Snap's $3.4 billion initial public offering of stock last week marked the hottest technology IPO in three years as investors snapped up shares of the Venice, California company, even though its two co-founders retained near total control. The situation alarms some big investors who fear other companies might copy Snap's structure.

Other big S&P 500 companies like Facebook and Google parent Alphabet also have non-voting shares but still grant voting rights with other widely-traded shares.

After the council raised concerns about Snap's lack of voting rights last month, Snap's chairman Michael Lynton wrote back on Feb. 21 to point out a section of its prospectus stating the voting structure "prolongs our ability to remain a founder-led company" and that Snap will have a majority-independent board, including himself.

Index inclusion requirements vary. For the S&P 500 a stock typically needs a market capitalization of around $5.5 billion and to have been profitable over the past four quarters, for instance, Blitzer said. 

(Reporting by Ross Kerber in Boston. Additional reporting by Lauren Hirsch in New York. Editing by Bernard Orr)

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Snap Inc. shares were lower in trading on Tuesday, a day after they fell below the opening price of $24 a share.

The stock of Snapchat's parent company has dropped 11% to as low as $21 a share, sending the earliest traders who bought at last week Thursday's debut deeper into the red on their investment.

None of the analysts who initiated coverage of the stock were bullish. Six rated "sell," and the other two rated "hold." Some analysts who are part of firms that worked on the initial public offering are not immediately able to rate the stock.

The stock popped 44% on Thursday, its first day of trading, after the company raised $3.4 billion in the IPO — the largest for a social network since Twitter. Its market value rose to $28.3 billion, surpassing companies like Macy's and American Airlines.

Analysts who are bearish on the stock argue that this valuation is too high for a company that has not yet turned a profit and is competing for ad spending with peers like Facebook.

Additionally, Snap was the first US company to list shares with nonvoting rights. For this reason, a group of investors has approached stock index providers including S&P Dow Jones Indices to prevent Snap from being part of their benchmarks, Reuters reported.

Short selling — used by traders to bet and profit on a stock's decline — may further pressure Snap shares.

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The third day was not the charm. Not for Snap, the company that owns the Snapchat app. An investor revolt, spearheaded by the Council of Institutional Investors, against Snap's nonvoting Class A shares is now deflating a big part of the hype around its IPO.

The hype worked like this: The market capitalization of Snap would be pushed so high that major indices, including the S&P 500 index and the MSCI USA Index, would include the stock, and that index and pension funds that track these indices would all have to buy the shares, and thus drive up the share price even further.

That was the bet. And now news of the revolt is spreading.

Snap's Class A shares plunged 12.3%, to $23.77, at the close on Monday, down 16% from their high in the morning. Shares now trade below the price at which they opened on March 2 during their first moments in the public market.

This is what Snap's first three days in the public market look like, and it made a big dent in the glory of what had been the hottest technology IPO in three years:

Investors that made money so far on these Class A shares are the institutions that had bought them the day before at the IPO price of $17. But for the public, these Class A shares haven't been a picnic.

Much of the hype had been focused on the stock being included in the S&P 500 index and the MSCI USA index, given its IPO valuation of $24 billion, and its market capitalization on Friday of about $30 billion. By comparison, Ford's market cap is $50 billion.

The bet was that once the shares are in the index, the real buying would commence by funds that track those indices and would, therefore, have to buy the shares. Given the relatively small number of shares traded, this buying pressure across the globe would push up the price even further. It was simply a matter of creating a lot of artificial demand. And investors were front-running that propitious moment.

But suddenly, there is doubt. Reuters reported:

"A group representing large institutional investors has approached index providers S&P Dow Jones Indices and MSCI Inc., looking to bar Snap Inc. and any other company that sells investors non-voting shares from their stock benchmarks."

While other large companies, most famously Facebook and Alphabet, have issued some nonvoting shares in addition to voting shares, shareholders can still vote, though only in watered-down form. Snap pioneered a new thing in selling only nonvoting shares in the IPO, and public shareholders cannot vote at all.

These are the three classes of Snap shares, but only Class A shares were sold to the public:

• Owners of Class A common stock have zilch votes per share.
• Owners of Class B common stock (certain early investors) have one vote per share.
• Owners of Class C common stock (cofounders Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy) have 10 votes per share.

The structure leaves the two cofounders in total control. Class A shareholders have no say whatsoever on the company's strategy, the pay of its executives, the board of directors, and whatever else the owners of a company would want to have a say over.

What Class A shareholders got for their money, in addition to the financial toxicity of the deal, was the hope and hype of the stock's inclusion in the indexes.

But now both index providers, the S&P Dow Jones indices and the MSCI USA index, said that they're reviewing Snap's inclusion.

"What we would like to see at the least is for the indexes to exclude new no-vote companies," Amy Borrus, deputy director of the Council of Institutional Investors, told Reuters. The Council represents pension funds and other large asset managers. Meetings with both index providers are scheduled this week, she said.

Reuters added:

"David Blitzer, managing director of S&P Dow Jones Indices and chair of a committee overseeing its indexes, said they would not add a new stock like Snap for six to 12 months after its IPO in any case, and will use that time to study Snap's structure.

"While the index provider does not have a hard requirement about a company's voting structure, the committee needs to think through how much influence investors should have, Blitzer said in an interview on Monday.

"'"Who Votes?" is the issue right now,' he said."

To be included in the S&P 500, Blitzer said, the company normally needs a market capitalization of around $5.5 billion and four profitable quarters in a row. That latter condition pretty eliminates Snap's chances of making it into the S&P 500 index in the foreseeable future.

On March 2, MSCI said that Snap would qualify for inclusion in its MSCI USA index. But on Friday after the markets had closed, and when no one was supposed to pay attention, MSCI changed its mind and announced:

"Following additional analysis, the IPO of SNAP (US) did not meet all of the relevant market capitalization requirements required for early inclusion into the MSCI USA Index.

"Therefore, and in accordance with the MSCI Global Investable Market Indexes methodology, SNAP (US)'s inclusion into the MSCI USA Index will be re-assessed as part of the next Semi-Annual Index Review, which occurs in May 2017."

MSCI "seeks feedback from the investment community" on whether companies without voting rights should be included in its indices.

What's left for Snap after the index hype has deflated? Plenty of other hype. And it might still blow over. Because hype is still in plentiful supply in this wondrous stock market.

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Like other tech IPOs, Snap Inc comes with plenty of risk. It has only two years of financial records under its belt, with just $58 million in revenue in 2015, and the future of its platform and business model, while full of potential, is mostly a question mark at this time.

Though Facebook has been a roaring success since overcoming challenges following its 2012 IPO, the market has seen other tech debuts fizzle, including Twitter, Groupon, Pandora, Zynga, and others. 

Snap doesn't define itself as a social media company, but the manner in which Snapchat connects users is similar to Twitter or Facebook, as well as Facebook subsidiaries Whats App and Instagram, so it's natural for the new IPO to draw comparisons to its older competitors. 

The good news here for investors is that Snap seems to bear more in common with the high-flying Facebook than lowly Twitter. Here are three reasons why.

1. Blockbuster growth

Though Snap has a short track record, the growth from 2015 to 2016 was outstanding as revenue jumped 589% from $58.7 million to $404.5 million. In the most recent quarter, revenue surged 406% to $165.7 million.

This is much faster growth than Twitter saw when it was of comparable size. From the first nine months in 2012 to the first nine months of 2013 -- the time leading up to Twitter's IPO -- its revenue grew just 106% $422.2 million. Twitter, founded in 2006, was older at that point than Snapchat, which launched its trademark product in 2011, is now. Twitter's revenue growth has since slowed to almost zero.

In the year before Facebook's 2012 IPO, revenue grew at 88%, a similar rate to Twitter's, but it had already reached $3.7 billion in revenue by 2011. Facebook's revenue growth has also held up much longer, hitting 51% in its most recent quarter.

Snapchat's user base is already bigger than Twitter's, as its daily active users reached 161 million in its most recent quarter, compared to Twitter, which today has only an estimated 140 million daily users.

2. Leadership

Behind Twitter's problems with slowing revenue growth and a lack of profits has been a revolving a door at the executive suite. At the time of its IPO, the company had already had three different CEOs, and since its debut there's been another reshuffle as co-Founder Jack Dorsey returned to the helm in 2015, replacing Dick Costolo. Dorsey has also been serving as CEO of Square during his current stint, adding to complications.

Twitter has also seen upheaval in other executive positions, as its COO and CTO have both left in recent months.

Snap, meanwhile, has had much more consistency in its leadership. Both of its co-founders remain in the two key executive positions -- Evan Spiegel serves as CEO, while Robert Murphy is CTO. 

That stability resembles Facebook, where founder Mark Zuckerberg continues to lead the company today, and his #2, Sheryl Sandberg, has been COO at the social giant since 2008.

It's hard to understate what consistent leadership means to these kinds of companies, as so much of their success is based on the decisions they make and will need to make in the future. Among the wise decisions, Snap's leaders have made was the now-validated move to reject Facebook's 2013 offer to acquire it for $3 billion.

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Snapchat cofounder Evan Spiegel just became $800 million richer.

The 26-year-old CEO has been officially awarded roughly 37 million additional company shares, according to a regulatory filing with the SEC. At Snap Inc.'s closing share price of $21.44 on Tuesday, Spiegel's bonus is worth roughly $800 million.

Before Snap's IPO, the company explained that Spiegel's so-called CEO award was intended to "motivate him to continue growing our business and improving our financial results so that we could undertake an initial public offering, which we regard as an important milestone that will provide liquidity to our stockholders and employees.”

Spiegel has fulfilled his end of the bargain now that Snap has gone public. The fully-vested shares, which total about 3% of Snap's outstanding stock, will be given to him in increments over a period of three years. The bonus places his net worth, which is almost entirely based on Snap's share price, at close to $5.5 billion.

Provided that Spiegel or cofounder Bobby Murphy don't sell additional shares, Spiegel's 3% stock award will also mean that he gets the most voting power at Snap after three years. Currently, he and Murphy each wield 50% of Snap's Class-C shares, which come with 10-1 voting rights. The company's publicly traded Class-A shares come with no voting rights.

SEE ALSO: 'Right now we're just celebrating': Inside Snap's crazy $33 billion IPO

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Snap's stock is taking a beating after a splashy initial public offering last week.

For all the buzz surrounding the maker of the popular Snapchat messaging app, there are two very big obstacles that threaten to stifle Snap's future growth.

Investors are spooked because:

1. A new risk just appeared that could remove a big growth catalyst for the stock
2. The company's total addressable market has a ceiling, and Snap hasn't explained how it plans to break through it

In other words, both Snap's stock price and its business are facing a big barrier. Result: After plunging for two consecutive days, Snap's stock is now 11% below its $24 opening price.

Let's take a look at each of the problems:

1. Snap could be barred from the big indexes

The first problem comes from the no-vote class A shares that Snap sold in its IPO. The decision to sell stock that doesn't give shareholders a say is not sitting well with everyone. As Reuters reported on Monday, a group representing large institutional investors is lobbying the major stock-index makers to exclude Snap's stock from the big indexes, such as the S&P 500 and the MSCI USA Index.

Being part of these indexes is a big deal. And it's not just about bragging rights. When a company is added to the S&P 500, it triggers a wave of buying from other funds that track and mimic the holdings of the index — a nice little tailwind to boost the stock.

When the news broke in 2013 that Facebook would be added to the S&P 500, the stock immediately got a boost in after-hours trading. Two months later, Facebook's stock was up 31%, and one year later it was up 57%.

Google's stock popped 8% after-hours when news of its inclusion in the S&P 500 was announced in 2006. It was up 10% two months later, and a year later the stock was trading 36% higher.

If Snap were barred from the indexes because of its capital structure, shareholders would be forfeiting a big potential growth catalyst for their investment.

To be fair, Snapchat warned investors in its prospectus that the no-vote class A stock could result in a lower trading price for the shares or lead to other "adverse consequences." Consider this one potential consequence.

2. Snap has not articulated how it will 'grow up'

Then there's Snap's business. The app is all the rage among teenagers and 20-something millennials. But the product is reputed to be impossible to use for older users who find its interface baffling and its content of puking-rainbow filters juvenile.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and his entourage did nothing to appease those worries during the pre-IPO road show. As Business Insider reported, the company told investors it did not plan to craft any kind of special strategy to appeal to older users.

Young users with disposable income are the dream demographic for all marketers. But if that's as big as the business will ever get, the potential for growth has a clear set of boundaries. Most of Snapchat's users are also concentrated in developed markets, because the app runs better on higher-end devices such as the iPhone.

Spiegel has said Snapchat will start to cater more to users of Android phones, which are widespread in emerging markets. But the road may be bumpy, with Snap already blaming a recent deceleration in its user growth to technical problems with its Android app.

Snapchat points to the gigantic $652 billion worldwide advertising market in its prospectus, and it says its young users are particularly tied to the $66 billion mobile ad market, which is projected to reach $196 billion in 2020. That's a massive opportunity, but the question is how much of it will Snap shut itself out from by focusing only on the cool kids in developed markets?

SEE ALSO: Here's what we know about Bobby Murphy, Snapchat's mysterious billionaire cofounder

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Marie Curie was known for a lot of things: her pioneering physics research, winning two Nobel Prizes, and paving the way for female scientists. 

So it struck a lot of people as a little odd that Snapchat's filter to commemorate Curie on International Women's Day provided the wearer with a smooth complexion, long, thick eyelashes, and a perfect smoky eye. 

Snapchat made two more filters to honor the day — one for Rosa Parks and another for Frida Kahlo — which celebrated what both women were known for. While Curie's filter has a cute animation where a test tube blows up and temporarily covers the user's face in soot, it quickly disappears and leaves behind a full face of makeup.

Several women took to Twitter to express their displeasure that Curie's filter seems to focus on making the user prettier. Here are some of the reactions. 

SEE ALSO: People are upset over the recent Snapchat filter that some are calling 'yellowface'

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/839519781929775104
@Snapchat Why does Marie Curie have a smoky eye and lash extensions? #InternationalWomensDay

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/839515397191778305
good thing the Marie Curie snapchat filter gives you pretty eyelashes, otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell she was a woman scientist 🙃

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/839504540844048390
Shoutout to @Snapchat for adding eyelashes to the Marie Curie filter. Forgot that's what she was famous for. #InternationalWomensDaypic.twitter.com/4gN2QjzR5B

Shares of Snap Inc rebounded on Wednesday following a steep selloff while an initial rush to short sell the stock appeared to be slowing.

The owner of the Snapchat messaging app had fallen sharply in the previous two sessions as investors focused on its lofty valuation following a $3.4 billion public listing last week that was the hottest technology offering in three years.

Shares of Snap, which has warned it may never be profitable, rose 3.6 percent to $22.21.

Traders betting against Snap on Wednesday added less than $50 million in new short sales of its stock, a slower pace than the day before, when initial short bets jumped to $300 million, according to S3 Partners, a financial analytics firm.

Short sellers borrow and then sell stocks they think will fall in value, hoping to profit by buying the stock back more cheaply later on and then returning it to its owner.

Reflecting a higher supply of Snap's shares and potentially less demand, the interest rates brokers charged to lend the shares declined to around 15 percent from as much as 40 percent on Tuesday, said S3 Partners Managing Director of Research Ihor Dusaniwsky.

Snap has been a roller-coaster ride for traders, surging 59 percent in its first two days of trading, and falling 18 percent since then.

Billionaire investor David Tepper, whose views on markets and stocks are closely watched by other money managers, told CNBC on Wednesday he bought shares of Snap in the IPO, sold some, and would buy again if the price dropped.

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When Snapchat's parent company, Snap, filed last month for a blockbuster $3 billion initial public offering, it was revealed that the young social network had also signed a $400 million-per-year deal with Google for cloud-computing services.

On stage at Wednesday's Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt called Snap "the strongest IPO in tech in a long time" and explained how Google played a key role in Snapchat's growth from its early days.

Amid Snapchat's meteoric rise to fame, Schmidt said, "no one could figure out how they could do this with so little capital." The answer, Schmidt said, "is that they used our infrastructure."

Google Cloud offers pay-as-you-go access to fundamentally unlimited supercomputing power. With Google Cloud, Snapchat could quickly grow its services to meet demand while simultaneously taking advantage of its tremendous worldwide footprint to quickly roll out to users across the globe, Schmidt said.

Plus, Schmidt said, Snapchat was able to use Google's range of cutting-edge technologies to quickly roll out new features, which reinforced its growth. In his only public interview, Snap cofounder Bobby Murphy said Google was key in its growth.

"So are you not planning to be like Snapchat?" Schmidt asked the conference crowd. With Google's range of services, he said, "you may as well plan for global success and infinite demand." And even if you're going after a smaller, more regional customer base, "dream big," he said.

Schmidt also called out the smartphone smash-hit app Pokémon Go, which was made by Niantic, a former Google subsidiary, and which hosts its services in Google Cloud, too. Schmidt credited Google Cloud with letting Pokémon Go launch globally amid tremendous demand.

"I'm quite convinced there was no other way to handle such a global phenomenon," Schmidt said.

In general, Schmidt says his message is simple: "Just get to the cloud now. Just go there now. There's no time to waste anymore."

However, it's worth noting that both Snapchat and Pokémon Go had growing pains in their earliest days, with downtime and outages common as they quickly found huge audiences.

SEE ALSO: Google Cloud boss Diane Greene takes a veiled shot at Amazon's big cloud outage

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Traders are paying "extortionate fees" of 15% to 20% to borrow shares of Snap in order to short them, according to figures reported by Simon Colvin, a research analyst at IHS Markit.

Snap shares surged 44% in their March 2 debut and hit a high of $28.84 the following day before short sellers emerged, driving the price below $21 on Tuesday. Snap recovered a bit on Wednesday, settling at $22.81.

While the fees are "extortionate," they're still well below the 45% that traders paid to short Facebook shares in the days following their debut May 2012 debut. Snap's fees are more in line with the 19% that traders paid to short Twitter after it went public in November 2013. Notably, short sellers were ready to pay a huge fee of 105% to go short Groupon shares.

According to calculations by Reuters, short sellers borrowed about 1.5% of all freely traded Snap shares on March 7 (first day the shares became available for borrowing in the market).

Here's how borrowing fees on Snap shares compared to other social media IPOs.

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After copying Snapchat in Instagram, WhatsApp, and the main Facebook app, Facebook is turning to Messenger.

On Thursday the company announced Messenger Day, which works like Snapchat Stories by letting you post photos and videos to your profile that disappear after 24 hours. A new row of thumbnails at the top of the Messenger app will show the latest posts from your friends.

Facebook started testing this Messenger feature in a handful of countries shortly after Instagram copied Snapchat last August, but now Messenger Day is being made available to the app's 1 billion users worldwide.

Aside from reinforcing Facebook's attack on Snapchat's camera-heavy experience, Messenger Day also opens up a potential way to monetize the Messenger app, which has struggled to get people using its chat bot platform for businesses in the past year. Instagram recently started showing fullscreen ads in its Stories feature.

The last holdout in Facebook's app arsenal is the main blue app, which is currently testing its own Facebook Stories in Europe and Africa.

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Facebook would "love" to acquire Snap Inc. if shares dipped to $14, FBN Securities analyst Shebly Seyrafi said in a note to clients on Thursday.

"One of the key points that the bears on Snap may be missing is that we believe that Facebook would love to acquire the company, and could be willing to pay $20B+ ($14/share) for the asset," Seyrafi writes.

Seyrafi reiterated in an email to Business Insider that his position is purely speculative and not based on inside sources, and warned in his note that cofounders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy "may decide not to sell, even when other investors think that this is the right course of action."

Spiegel and Murphy collectively wield majority voting rights, and the duo famously rebuffed a $3 billion offer from Facebook a few years ago.

Citing reasons why Facebook would still want to buy Snap, Seyrafi pointed to the company's $22 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, which was not generating meaningful revenue at the time. He noted that Facebook has the balance sheet to make a large acquisition, with $30 billion in cash and investments on hand at the end of 2016.

Seyrafi said that Facebook buying Snap would "remove one of the very few long-term threats to its business," given Snapchat's dominance among millennials and forecasted growth with older demographics. "Several years ago, survey work showed that many teens were disengaging off of Facebook and moving over to Snap, and investors were quite concerned about the long-term ramifications of losing such a key age cohort," he wrote.

Seyrafi also pointed to Comcast as a potential Snap suitor, citing its NBCUniversal division's $500 million investment in Snap during the IPO.

FBN Securities has given Snap a sector perform rating and $23 price target. Snap has yet to receive a buy rating from any analysts.

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Snapchat has a new storefront for its Spectacles camera glasses.

The app's parent company, Snap Inc., has opened a new retail store just a stone's throw from its headquarters in the beachtown Venice, California. A photo of the new store was recently posted on the Spectacles website, and a Snap spokeswoman confirmed the new location to Business Insider on Thursday.

The new Spectacles store in Venice will be open daily from 11 a.m. local time to sunset for the next several weeks, the spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman declined to say whether the store is permanent or temporary. 

Aside from yellow vending machines that spontaneously appear in different parts of the US, Snap's only retail presence for Spectacles to date was a storefront in New York City that recently closed. The company also recently started selling Spectacles, which cost $130, on its website to anyone in the US.

Spectacles aren't a meaningful part of Snap's revenue stream yet, but the glasses are its first hardware product as a self-described camera company.

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Facebook Messenger is rolling out its Snapchat stories clone, dubbed “Messenger Day,” globally, according to TechCrunch.

Messenger users can share ephemeral illustrated and filter-enhanced photos and videos with their friends — in the same way Snapchat users do. The app initially tested in Poland and Australia.

If successful, Messenger Day could help Facebook realize its recent efforts:

• It could encourage more visual communication. Messenger, and Facebook in general, is doubling down on its efforts to make the camera the center of the app. In January 2017, Messenger VP David Marcus projected that the camera would become an increasingly important part of the smartphone experience as technological advancements allow for higher-quality and more engaging interactions.
• Provide a revenue stream for Messenger. It’s likely that Messenger will begin showing ads in between posts on Messenger Day, according to Marcus. This has already been an effective strategy for Instagram and Snapchat.
• Stunt Snapchat’s global growth. Facebook’s efforts to imitate Snapchat are likely to ensure it maintains its dominant market position. Messenger’s more than 1 billion MAU mean that it has a strong presence in many markets that Snapchat is yet to broach or doesn’t have significant usage in.

The top four messaging apps — Facebook's Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Viber — now claim nearly 3 billion monthly active users combined, narrowly outnumbering the combined active users on the world's four largest social networks, including Facebook.

These numbers have caught the attention of a wide range of businesses, publishers among them. News industry leaders including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the BBC are establishing a presence on a number of chat apps in an effort to be out front and build an audience on the latest platforms where people are consuming content. These early adopters are experimenting to learn which chat apps work for their audience and how they can leverage chat for the distribution of digital content, including articles, images, surveys, and video. 

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on messaging apps for publishers that looks at the appeal of these apps and how they're becoming a dominant platform for media consumption. It compares the leading chat platforms, including WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook's Messenger, and Viber, and what features publishers should know about when thinking about how they might leverage these properties. It also looks at strategies for content distribution across chat apps and finally spotlights some of the challenges that publishers may encounter as they begin to dip their toes into content distribution via messaging apps.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• There are dozens of messaging platforms, each with distinct user demographics and features, and these differences will determine which apps a publisher should try and what type of content is most fitting. 
• Publishers like The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the BBC are experimenting to learn which chat apps work for their audience and how they can leverage chat for the distribution of digital content, including articles, images, surveys, and video.
• Chat apps are especially appealing to publishers because they allow these brands to tap into users' "dark social" activity. Dark social traffic stems from people sharing content privately through IM programs, messaging apps, and email, among other means.
• Because chat apps were once primarily used for peer-to-peer communications, publishers have an opportunity to reach audiences on these platforms through a more conversational exchange. 

In full, the report:

• Breaks down the pros and cons of each major messaging app.
• Explains the different ways publishers can distribute content on messaging apps.
• Highlights the differences between native and linked content.
• Looks at the potential barriers that could limit chat apps' utility for publishers.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >>START A MEMBERSHIP
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Facebook's copying of Snapchat made sense in Instagram. Everyone there already shared photos and videos, so why not let them expire after 24 hours?

But now that Facebook has systematically cloned Snapchat in WhatsApp, Messenger, and even its main app as well, the end result is a confusing mess.

Take Messenger, which a few days ago added its own Snapchat knock-off called "Messenger Day." Now a camera button sits at the bottom center of the app, while a new row of thumbnails shows' "days" from your friends at the top of the screen.

Until now, Messenger has been a good, simple tool for texting — so good, in fact, that the app has amassed 1 billion users. Now it looks like this:

Then there's WhatsApp, which recently debuted a new "Status" feature that — you guessed it — looks just like Snapchat and Instagram Stories too.

Even if Facebook won't admit it, it's clear that the company has been inspired by Snapchat. And copying Snapchat's ephemerality and goofiness doesn't feel out of place in a visually-rich app like Instagram.

But does that same experience also make sense in Messenger, WhatsApp, and the main Facebook app? When am I supposed to use one app's camera instead of the other?

When I asked Facebook why it's putting such a similar camera experience in all of its apps, a spokesperson told me that the format is simply a standard way that people want to communicate now, so it made sense to offer it in all Facebook apps.

“The stories format has been widely adopted, and it’s one of the ways people share updates in a lightweight way throughout their day," the Facebook spokesperson said. "We’ve added this feature to WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and have started to test it on Facebook too because we’ve learned that people like to use stories in different contexts and we want to give them the option to share this way across all of our apps.”

It's true that camera-based messaging is gaining traction; the behavior is arguably the key factor behind Snapchat's popularity, and 'talking with pictures' is an idea that Snapchat cofounder Evan Spiegel constantly preaches.

There's also Facebook's incredible scale to consider.

The social network has billions of users across its four main apps, and while many of those users likely overlap, many certainly do not. Facebook's core mission is to reach the largest number of people possible, so it makes sense from a business perspective to cast a wide net with its new camera-centric, Snapchat-inspired strategy.

But for people like myself who use multiple Facebook apps, the company's copy and pasting of features feels forced and confusing.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

SEE ALSO: Here are all the times Facebook copied Snapchat in 2016

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For some millennial investors, loyalty to one of their favorite apps matters more than financial details in the case of Snap Inc.

The stock of Snapchat's parent company has been on a roller-coaster ride since its market debut last week, surging more than 70% from the initial public offering price in the first two days of trading and plunging back down by a quarter since.

Some seasoned investors have been wary of the volatile, relatively high-priced stock of a company that has yet to report a profit. But novice investors said their deep affinity with the disappearing-message app prompted them to jump in.

"I bought it even when I was pretty positive I would not make a profit in the short run, but just because I am a fan of the product," said Chris Roh, a 25-year-old software engineer in San Francisco who has been trading stocks for only about a month on Robinhood, a mobile trading app popular among millennials.

Snap sold shares at $17 apiece in its initial public offering on March 1. The day after, on the first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the stock popped as high as $26.05.

Roh said he bought the stock on that first trading day at $25 a share.

Trading activity on Robinhood jumped by 50% on the day of Snap's debut, with more than 40% of those who traded that day buying Snap shares. The median age of Snap shareholders on the platform was 26, the same age as Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, according to Robinhood.

Snap's surge extended into the second day of trading, March 3, when its stock went as high as $29.44. It has sunk 25% since, closing on Friday at $22.07.

Kaleana Markley, a 29-year-old human-resources consultant in San Francisco, bought Snap shares as her first stock market investment.

"Snap just felt like the IPO of my time, and seeing where Facebook and Amazon are now I really think Snap has the potential to grow (like them)," said Markley, who bought the shares through Stockpile, another online brokerage aimed at millennials, generally defined as people reaching young adulthood in the early part of this century.

Markley said she bought some shares in Snap on the first day of trading and some more on the second day, when the stock hit the highest level of its short lifetime.

"There are a lot of companies I don't know or recognize, but Snap, I use the product, and know everyone — my friends, my coworkers, even my parents — uses it."

Though some more experienced investors have avoided loss-making Snap, millennials were not alone in their hunger for shares of the company, which now has a market value of more than $25 billion.

Many sophisticated institutional money managers were also intent on getting a piece of the hottest tech IPO in years, despite concerns about the company's slowing user growth and lack of voting rights for new shareholders.

Snap declined to comment on trading in its shares.

Inflated levels?

Companies with especially enthusiastic customer bases, such as the action-camera maker GoPro Inc., the social-games company Zynga Inc., and the English soccer club Manchester United Plc, have in the past attracted fans to dabble in their IPOs.

But the wildly popular Snapchat — with an average of about 158 million daily active users — appears to be taking the enthusiasm to another level, some analysts and brokers said.

"One of the nonfundamental reasons driving the stock is that many millennials purchased Snap shares at inflated levels due to their preference for the product," said Shebly Seyrafi, the managing director at FBN Securities. "That is, not due to a real understanding of the number or valuation."

Snapchat's users, mostly in the 18-to-34 age range coveted by advertisers, spend an average of 25 to 30 minutes on the app and visit it more than 18 times a day, according to the company, making it more visited than any other social-media platform.

"Snap is tapping into the pride of ownership (for millennials) which we don't see often in the stock market," said Dan Schatt, the chief commercial officer at Stockpile.

Snap's IPO gave Stockpile its biggest single day since it launched in 2015, nearly 10 times the service's daily average in transaction and sales.

"Snap is offering the comfort of buying something that you know so well, understand and use it every day, which is what these young investors want," said Schatt, whose teenage daughter and son also bought Snap shares with his approval on Stockpile.

On StockTwits, a Twitter-like platform for sharing trading ideas, where 40% of users are between the ages of 18 and 34, Snap has been the most talked-about stock for days.

There are concerns about slowing user growth and competition from Facebook Inc. The overall sentiment on the stock is now 44% bullish and 56% bearish, compared with early February when bullish sentiment was 100%, according to StockTwits.

That has not deterred Tiffany Dun, a San Francisco-based mortgage consultant in her late 20s who purchased 125 shares in Snap on the first day of trading at about $22 a share.

"There's always risk to everything," she said. "I use the product and I like it, so I bought some."

(Reporting by Angela Moon; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Bill Rigby)

SEE ALSO: There are a few problems with the February jobs report

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Most videos shared on Snapchat or Instagram are simple: selfies, streaks, or your surroundings. 

But increasingly, publications, brands, and people with large followings are creating a new kind of clip, with text overlays, slick production, and links to outside content — like what you can find in Snapchat Discover.

A new app called Flyr is making it easier to create those kind of videos and share them to multiple platforms, including Snapchat and Instagram Stories. 

The iPhone app, which is free, is basically an editor for "stories," or rich interactive content you scroll through by tapping. The app is fast, especially rendering the videos, and the videos it creates look professionally done. 

Inside the app, there's a section that allows users to share their videos with other Flyr users. Flyr is also making its own videos, in its own version of Snapchat Discover. "We built our own Discover with an intern," cofounder Hassan Uriostegui said, because the app makes creating these kind of videos so much faster, he explained. 

"Brands out there want social video posts, social video ads, and they don't have a fast and inexpensive way to do it," Flyr cofounder Brett O'Brien told Business Insider.

The company has $5 million in seed funding, its founders told Business Insider, and are looking for further investment to expand its LA-based team of five. 

Here's what using the Flyr app is like: 

SEE ALSO: Here's how to access the iPhone's hidden mode that turns the camera into a magnifying glass

Flyr creates videos that look like Instagram Stories or Snapchat Discover.

Brands and publications are making these videos now, but there aren't many "what you see is what you get" editors available. That's where Flyr comes in.

Flyr gives you several templates to insert GIFs, video, and photos into a story.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has employed its first person in Germany as it looks to expand its business further into Europe.

The LA-headquartered tech firm, which listed on the New York Stock Exchange at $33 billion (£27 billion) earlier this month, hired Hamburg-based Jolanta Twarowska from Twitter in January, according to LinkedIn and two other sources.

Twarowska wrote on her LinkedIn profile that she is a senior account exec working on advertising sales at the photo-sharing firm. She did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Snap is also interested in hiring ex-Pinterest country manager Jan Honsel, possibly as managing director of its Germany business, according to two Business Insider sources. However, when Honsel was asked if he was joining the company, he told Business Insider: "For some reason this rumour keeps spreading but it isn't the case."

Snap hopes to have five to 10 people in Germany by the end of 2017, according to a source, who said all the roles will be in sales.

In a bid to get its new Germany sales operation off the ground, Snap interviewed everyone that left Twitter in Berlin at the end of last year, according to a source. It's unclear if Snap is planning to hire anyone else from Twitter beyond Twarowska.

Snap doesn't yet have a physical office in Germany but it has been looking for one, according to a source. The office is likely to be in Hamburg or Berlin. German newspaper Bild reported last September that Snap was planning to open an office on the banks of the River Elbe in Hamburg, saying that the company was seeking a space for a maximum of 20 staff.

The team that Snap is planning to hire will be largely responsible for signing up publishers onto its "Discover" platform, which will launch in Germany on April 25, according to a source.

Discover allows publishers to push their content at Snapchat's millions of users in exchange for a fee. Discover will launch in Germany with Vice, Spiegel Online, and possibly German teen magazine Bravo, a source said.

There are currently no job listings on Snapchat's website for roles in Germany but there is a job ad on Vice's website for an editorial person working on Snapchat.

Snap declined to comment on this story.

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The publicly traded shares without any voting rights in a company totally controlled by just two guys should be labeled “junk equity,” said Anne Simpson, an investment director at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest public pension fund in the US.

“You’re constraining the capital markets in a way you’ll come back to regret,” she told the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee on Thursday, as reported by the LA Times. “Innovation, we’re interested in that; but this is an immature attempt to avoid accountability.”

They were discussing the non-voting shares issued during the IPO of Snap Inc., parent of Snapchat. It was the hottest tech IPO in three years when it went public last week, though its shares have had a very rough time this week.

Snap was on the forefront of financial “innovation,” bravely going where no other IPO had dared to go before: issuing only shares without voting rights. The two founders retain total control. Some early investors have very diluted voting rights. But those who own the publicly traded Class A shares just have a pile of hype in a company that, according to its pre-IPO S-1 filing, is likely to lose money until the end of its days.

Normal ownership rights – having a say on the company’s strategy, the pay of its executives, the board of directors, etc. – would threaten the two founders, given the financial performance of the company. It’s better to keep the mob of frustrated shareholders at bay.

Ken Bertsch, executive director at the Council of Institutional Investors, which represents pension funds and large institutional investors, told the SEC meeting that input by investors has led “to the vitality of American capitalism … even when egos are bruised, strategies are upended, and executives” get forced out.

If Snap gets away with this, issuing non-voting shares will become pandemic, and shareholders will become helpless dupes.

In early February, when Snap filed its S-1 with the SEC, I published a scathing report about Snap’s planned IPO, its slowing growth of users, its ludicrous valuation, and the disclosure that it would pay Google Cloud $400 million per year on average over the next five years to host the site. Snap’s 2016 revenues were only $404 million. That doesn’t leave any money to cover employee compensation, office expenses, and a million other things companies pay for. Hence losses as far as the eye can see.

These are the risks IPO investors are willing to take. Lose nine, win one big. That’s the hope. I wrote:

But there is something much more important at stake: surrendering your voting rights. And if equity investors – this includes institutional investors that will back the IPO – don’t revolt now, it’s going to become pandemic.

And now institutional investors have woken up. The revolt has started.

The Council of Institutional Investors has come out against non-voting shares in recent days. Its point of attack is where it hurts: Pressuring the providers of major stock indices, such as the S&P 500 index, to exclude non-voting stocks. When S&P Dow Jones Indices and MSCI said they’ll review the inclusion of Snap in their indices, its shares plunged for two days in a row.

Much of the hype was focused on inflating Snap’s market capitalization so much ($24 billion on its first day of trading) that it would have to be included in the S&P 500 Index and the MSCI USA Index. And that itself became the selling point of the IPO.

The whole thing resembles a scam, as I wrote on March 6 [Investor Group Attacks Snap’s No-Vote Shares, Stock plunges]:

The bet was that once the shares are in the index, the real buying would commence by funds that track those indices and would therefore have to buy the shares. Given the relatively small number of shares traded, this buying pressure across the globe would push up the price even further. It was simply a matter of creating a lot of artificial demand.

It’s not uncommon that voting rights are stacked against holders of publicly traded shares. The founders of Google and Facebook have set up such systems to protect themselves against the wrath of investors. Companies with disproportionate voting power represent about 12% of the S&P 500. But only Snap has created a structure where all its publicly traded shares are non-voting.

Even the SEC is finally waking up. Kurt Schacht, who chairs the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, warned at the meeting on Thursday that issuing non-voting shares “might be the next big thing.”

Kara Stein, one of the two current SEC Commissioners (there are normally five), told the meeting, according to Reuters: “Unequal voting rights present complex and new issues that need to be understood and addressed.”

“We also must be mindful of the precedent being created,” she added. The SEC should study companies that in their IPOs offer shares without voting rights, with a “focus on how some innovations may prove detrimental to investors.”

“In the long run, we need to critically assess our regime for initial public offerings,” she said. “The current structure is premised on taking investors’ capital while giving the investor rights to hold that company’s management accountable of that capital.”

The Investor Advisory Committee didn’t reach a conclusion on Thursday; and deeper discussions will follow in a subcommittee hearing.

On the surface, it seems there’s a solution right now: Investors could just stay away from Snap’s toxic non-voting class A shares, letting them fall into penny-stock territory where they could languish until the company figures out how to make money, or until it folds, whichever comes first.

But that option might not be possible for institutional investors, such as index funds and pension funds that track stock market indices. They have to buy the shares once they’re included in the index. And that’s where the scam comes in: hyping the stock and driving up the price to where market capitalization is high enough for the stock to get included in the S&P 500 and other indices which would then force these pension and index funds to buy the shares.

This forced buying creates artificial demand, which allows early investors and insiders to exit at peak valuations, and it allows the company to issue more shares and raise more money to cover its losses for years to come. In the end, it’s in those funds, forced to buy the shares with other people’s money, where the shares will wither until they get dropped from the index on their way to oblivion.

SEE ALSO: Toshiba wants to push back the release of its third quarter earnings — again

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