In 2017, Snapchat showed up in 637 of the stories we collected at Advertising Perspectives. That’s more than retail media, header bidding or the third-party cookie managed in any single year of our archive.
In 2024, it showed up in 11.
Snap didn’t go anywhere. It is still a public company with hundreds of millions of daily users and an advertising business that, as of this month, was underwhelming its own CEO with its third-quarter growth. That’s a real business with real problems, which is a different thing from a phenomenon. The trade press covers phenomena. Somewhere between 2017 and 2020, Snapchat stopped being one.
Its arc is worth reading closely, because it’s the clearest case in our archive of the gap between how much the industry talks about a platform and how much that platform matters to a media plan.
The count
Stories in our archive that mention Snapchat, by year:
| Year | Stories |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 75 |
| 2017 | 637 |
| 2018 | 290 |
| 2019 | 110 |
| 2020 | 67 |
| 2021 | 44 |
| 2022 | 13 |
| 2023 | 23 |
| 2024 | 11 |
| 2025 | 59 |
The 2017 number is inflated by TechCrunch and Mashable, which covered the company’s IPO like a consumer tech event. The shape holds in the advertising press too: one enormous year, then a long decline, then a small revival in 2025 for reasons that have nothing to do with hype.
2017: Everybody’s favorite platform
In September 2016, Snapchat told Advertising Week it was a camera company with more TV-like content to come. Four months later, it was quietly making updates that Facebook advertisers liked. In February 2017 it filed for its IPO, looking to raise $3 billion, and the coverage went everywhere.
For a few months, Snapchat was the place every brand and publisher felt it had to be. Publishers built for Discover, and Digiday was writing about how The New York Times planned to build a daily habit on Snapchat. AdExchanger ran a piece on what TV advertisers could learn from Snapchat. Even the format was being copied, with The Huffington Post launching a Snapchat-style “storybook” format.
The same year, the cracks
What’s striking, reading it now, is how fast the doubts showed up. They were in the coverage alongside the excitement, often in the same month.
The product was copied. On January 30, 2017, the day TechCrunch reported Snap would list on the New York Stock Exchange, it also reported that Instagram Stories was stealing Snapchat’s users. By April, Digiday’s headline was blunt: scale matters, and advertisers were opting for Instagram over Snapchat.
The buying was hard. In February, Digiday reported that media buying on Snapchat confused advertisers, with “more options and misunderstandings” than buyers were used to. Snapchat brought in Moat for viewability measurement in May, which was a sign of what advertisers were asking for.
The publishers struggled. Discover publishers were already facing a tough challenge as the platform chased TV, and the feed was developing a lot of viral sameness.
And the industry noticed. By May 12, barely ten weeks after the IPO, Digiday’s weekly roundup said Snapchat had entered the trough of disappointment. In November came a major redesign, and in January 2018 Snap laid off staff amid slowed user growth.
What Snap did instead
Here’s the part the coverage mostly missed, because it wasn’t exciting enough to cover.
Snap stopped trying to be TV and started trying to be useful to advertisers who measure results. The first sign was in June 2017, when Digiday reported that Snapchat had opened the floodgates to “bad ads” by loosening its creative standards. That sounds like a step down. It was actually a step toward the self-serve, performance-driven advertisers who make up the bulk of every successful platform’s revenue.
By 2018 it was courting direct-response marketers. By early 2019, AdExchanger reported that direct-response advertisers had doubled their spend on Snapchat in a single quarter. In 2020 it shored up its app ads with new bid types and objectives.
Its signature format took the same path. In late 2018, Snapchat’s AR ads, once $500,000, were cheap enough to lure smaller advertisers. A year later, its AR creators were telling marketers to keep it simple.
That groundwork paid off at the worst possible moment for its competitors. When Apple’s App Tracking Transparency hit mobile advertising in 2021, AdExchanger reported in February 2022 that, unlike Meta, Snap said it was on the rebound, crediting first-party measurement and its AR investments.
By 2025, the small revival in coverage was about the least glamorous thing possible: small business. Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit were turning to AI to capture SMB ad dollars, and Digiday reported that Snapchat’s SMB bet was paying off, with the fair question of whether it could keep the momentum.
What this says about reading the trade press
None of this means Snap is a runaway success. The 2026 headline about underwhelming ad growth is a fair reminder that it isn’t. But the gap between the coverage and the business is the useful lesson, and it applies well beyond one company.
Coverage measures novelty, not importance. Snapchat was most interesting to write about when it was least proven as an ad platform. It became more useful to advertisers at roughly the same pace it became less interesting to cover.
Scale and measurement beat format. The two headlines that predicted Snap’s 2017 problems weren’t about its product. One was about scale (advertisers choosing Instagram) and one was about buying and measurement (advertisers confused). Every platform that has asked for a real share of a media plan has had to answer those two questions first.
The boring pivot is usually the right one. Self-serve tools, direct response, cheaper formats, small business. None of those generate a trade-press cycle, and all of them are how an ad platform actually grows.
Watch what the buyers do, not what the stage says. In 2017 the industry talked about Snapchat constantly while quietly moving budget to Instagram. The useful signal was in the second half of that sentence.
The same gap is worth keeping in mind for whatever platform is everyone’s favorite this year. The question isn’t how many stories it’s getting. It’s whether buyers can reach enough people, measure what happened and buy it without a manual. When those answers are yes, the coverage usually drops, and the business usually starts.
Every headline in this piece links to the original story. Browse the archive’s full Snapchat coverage, or related coverage of Instagram Stories and direct response.
Kevin Reynolds is the founder of Advertising Perspectives, MadTech Consulting and data4orce.ai. He is a marketing technology architect and C-level advisor, with a focus on Salesforce and data-driven advertising.