Advertisers still skeptical of snapchat but find hope in more use from teens

Snapchat allows people to send messages, photos and videos that disappear after ten seconds. The popularity of the service prompted Facebook to step up and make a $3-billion acquisition offer for the company. But Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel thinks the company is worth more with app purchases and advertising as potential revenue for the mobile messaging service, thus declining the offer.

It looks like Spiegel might not have the right idea by resisting the offer and hoping for more. Rich Guest, president of Tribal Worldwide's U.S. operations said Ad Age, "I struggle to think of any of our clients who would be willing to even pilot advertising on Snapchat."

Ad Age also reported some of the basic info about this service and it's reach:

To convey its growth, the company announced in September that its users were sending 350 million "snaps" -- or vanishing photo and video messages -- daily, up from 200 million in June. But it hasn't disclosed how many unique users it has or what portion of them are teenagers -- the demographic that's believed to dominate the service.

The apparent benefit of Snapchat is privacy, so as part of the companies privacy value proposition, they will delete user messages after they have been delivered (even though they do have their email addresses, phone numbers and birth dates).

With the momentary model of Snapchat, it makes it difficult to work with advertisers, but there may be promise for big business and franchises to use the service, especially with the new "stories" function, which is a collection of snaps put together and are available for 24 hours.

"I think a lot of early [advertiser] adopters will be musicians and movies and entertainment brands," Tyler Willis, VP-business development at the social-ads company Unified told Ad Age. "That's the lowest-hanging fruit for Snapchat, given their user base is a little younger."