It’s clear that Facebook desperately wants to match Snapchat and they are ready to put their hands on the fire. It has been reported that Facebook unsuccessfully tried to acquire the Asian Snapchat clone Snow from Naver — a Korean based company behind another messaging app Line. Often dubbed as Asian Snapchat, Snow is reportedly worth around $25 billion dollars.
The Korean Snapchat look-alike sits on top of Google Play Store and Apple App Store ranking in Korea, Japan, and China with a total of 80 million downloads — 10 million downloads each month. That’s some crazy and impressive stats considering that the company is just 1 years old.
A story from The New York Times disclosed that Snow and Naver were challenging Snapchat indirectly in Asia, while the app was also the main reason behind Snapchat’s lack of interest in Asian countries. Back in the day, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg got alarmed about the situation and secretly got in touch with Naver Chairman Hae-Jin Lee over the phone – which later went on to be an unsuccessful proposal. The main reason behind the rejection is assumed to be that Lee believes the app has the potential to be a success like its counterpart app – Line which raised over $1 billion dollars this year in July.
The company is currently busy on working with Korean and Japanese celebrities to feature their stories in the app, exclusively parallel to the live stream. Talking about the app, Snow features 36 filters and more than 200 masks, which is cogently more than that of Snapchat — the main reason behind appealing its user base in Asia.
As for Facebook, the company already has integrated the “Story” features in Instagram which was a blatant copy of Snapchat story feature. However, the feature attracted nearly 100 million users within 2 months, while the social giant is also working on separate video app which is also to be believed as a copy of Snapchat camera feature.
