In March of 2016, Snapchat started testing out a Kraft Mac and Cheese game in which you catch noodles with your mouth. Getting a score of 1000 would be considered a high score as each noodle is worth 100 points. There is a timer so you only get 10 seconds. Every single iteration of Snapchat brings about more gamification and more was to keep users in the app. We suspect there will be many more Face Filter games to come as Snapchat has struck gold with the selfie or face filters.
The latest Snapchat game offering is a puzzle game where you slide tiles around and reconstruct the image of your face. Just like most Snapchat features, there is a timer. In addition to the timer, you can accumulate a high score. We have been unable to successfully get a very high score, but we know that Snapchat users are obsessing about this trying to get the highest score and the best time.
The gamification of social media apps should come as no surprise. It has been widely known that Google Search is the way for businesses to generate new customers, so how are social media apps like Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram going to make money? The way they are attempting to make money is to gamify the app. Snapchat has added face filters, games and stories.
In August of 2016, Instagram released “Stories” for their app. Look for all social media platforms to add stories in the near future. Once again, this is the gamification that will help them create some revenue because almost no one goes to social media to search for a product or service.
Snapchat has greatly struggled to create revenue from the app. The cost of hosting all the photos and videos is adding up and the Snapchat team has yet to find a way to monetize all these videos and chats flowing through their app. This is similar to the old day of both AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. There were tons of users creating content but there was no way for the platform to make money off the users creating this content. The cost of hosting continues to add up and these companies hope investors continue to give them money to grow their platform and eventually come up with a monetization model.