From its earliest days, Snapchat's main demographic has consisted of millennials.In 2014, researchers from the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University designed a user survey to help understand how and why the application was being used. The researchers originally hypothesized that due to the ephemeral nature of Snapchat messages, its use would be predominantly for privacy-sensitive content including the much talked about potential use for sexual content and sexting.However, it appears that Snapchat is used for a variety of creative purposes that are not necessarily privacy-related at all.In the study, only 1.6% of respondents reported using Snapchat primarily for sexting, although 14.2% admitted to having sent sexual content via Snapchat at some point.These findings suggest that users do not seem to utilize Snapchat for sensitive content. Rather, the primary use for Snapchat was found to be for comedic content such as "stupid faces" with 59.8% of respondents reporting this use most commonly.The researchers also determined how Snapchat users do not use the application and what types of content they are not willing to send. They found that the majority of users are not willing to send content classified as sexting (74.8% of respondents), photos of documents (85.0% of respondents), messages containing legally questionable content (86.6% of respondents), or content considered mean or insulting (93.7% of respondents).[102] The study results also suggested that Snapchat's success is not due to its security properties, but because the users found the application to be fun. The researchers found that users seem to be well aware (79.4% of respondents) that recovering snaps is possible and a majority of users (52.8% of respondents) report that this does not affect their behavior and use of Snapchat.Most users (52.8% of respondents) were found to use an arbitrary timeout length on snaps regardless of the content type or recipient. The remaining respondents were found to adjust their snaps' timeout depending on the content or the recipient. Reasons for adjusting the time length of snaps included the level of trust and relationship with the recipient, the time needed to comprehend the snap, and avoiding screenshots.

Snapchat has often been seen to represent a new direction in social media, with its users, particularly millennials, craving a more in-the-moment way of sharing and communicating via technology. With less emphasis on the accumulation of an ongoing status involving the presence of permanent material, Snapchat put focus on the ephemeral nature of fleeting encounters.Building on this distinction by launching as a mobile-first company, Snapchat, in the midst of the app revolution and the growing presence of cellular communication, didn't have to make the transition to mobile in the way other competing social media networks had to do. Evan Spiegel himself described Snapchat as primarily a camera company.Spiegel also dismissed past comparisons to other social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter when he was asked if the 2016 presidential race was going to be remembered as the Snapchat election, although major candidates did occasionally use the app to reach voters.Nevertheless, the growing mobile app moved to offer distinct publication, media, and news content within its Discover channel, as well as with its overall style of presentation. With Snapchat, a clear and identifiable line was drawn between brand content and user-based messaging and sharing, once again distinguishing the popular app from other social media networks, which typically have blended and blurred their different varieties of content.

Snapchat's developing features embody a deliberate strategy of monetization. Snapchat announced its then-upcoming advertising efforts on October 17, 2014, when it acknowledged its need for a revenue stream.The company stated that it wanted to evaluate "if we can deliver an experience that's fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted."Snapchat's first paid advertisement, in the form of a 20-second movie trailer for the horror film Ouija, was shown to users on October 19, 2014. In January 2015, Snapchat began making a shift from focusing on growth to monetization. The company launched its "Discover" feature, which allowed for paid advertising by presenting short-form content from publishers. Its initial launch partners included CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN and Food Network, among others.In June 2015, Snapchat announced that it would allow advertisers to purchase sponsored geofilters for snaps; an early customer of the offering was McDonald's, who paid for a branded geofilter covering its restaurant locations in the United States.Snapchat made a push to earn ad revenue from its "Live Stories" feature in 2015, after initially launching the feature in 2014. Ad placements can be sold within a live story, or a story can be pitched by a sponsor. Live stories are estimated to reach an average of 20 million viewers in a 24-hour span.In September 2015, the service entered into a partnership with the National Football League to present live stories from selected games (including a Sunday game, and marquee games such as Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football), with both parties contributing content and handling ad sales.The 2015 Internet Trends Report by Mary Meeker highlighted the significant growth of vertical video viewing. Vertical video ads like Snapchat's are watched in their entirety nine times more than landscape video ads. In April 2016, NBC Olympics announced that it had reached a deal with Snapchat to allow stories from the 2016 Summer Olympics to be featured on Snapchat in the United States. The content would include a behind-the-scenes Discover channel curated by BuzzFeed (a company which NBCUniversal has funded), and stories featuring a combination of footage from NBC, athletes, and attendees. NBC will sell advertising and enter into revenue sharing agreements. This marked the first time NBC allowed Olympics footage to be featured on third-party property.In May 2016, as part of a campaign to promote X-Men: Apocalypse, 20th Century Fox paid for the entire array of lenses to be replaced by those based on characters from the X-Men series and films for a single day.In July 2016, it was reported that Snapchat had submitted a patent application for the process of using an object recognition system to deliver sponsored filters based on objects seen in a camera view.Later that year, in Sep 2016, Snapchat released its first hardware product, called the Spectacles. Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc., called it “a toy” but saw it as an upside to freeing his app from smartphone cameras.[118] In April 2017, Digiday reported that Snapchat would launch a self-service manager for advertising on the platform.The feature launched the following month, alongside news of a Snapchat Mobile Dashboard for tracking ad campaigns, set to roll out in June to select countries.Also in 2017, Snapchat introduced a "Snap to Store" advertising tool that lets companies using geostickers to track whether users buy their product or visit their store in a 7-day period after seeing the relevant geosticker.