Facebook tried to buy Asian Snapchat clone Snow

Here's fuel to the fire for the individuals who trust that Facebook will purchase anything that looks, smells or moves like Snapchat. The U.S. long range informal communication mammoth this mid year made an unsuccessful offer to gain Snow, a Snapchat-like administration from Naver, the $25 billion-esteemed Korean firm behind visit application Line, a source near the organization told TechCrunch.

Snow as of now has around 80 million downloads, and it is including around 10 million all the more every month, as indicated by the source. That development has additionally energized securing enthusiasm from Tencent — the producer of blockbuster talk application WeChat — Alibaba and others, TechCrunch gets it.

"It's actual that Snow is getting love calls from different organizations," a delegate from Naver let us know in an announcement. In spite of recognizing outside intrigue, Naver did not name Snow's eventual suitors.

Facebook did not react to demands for input.

The application initially got consideration in the mid year when it dashed up Android and iOS application store rankings in Korea, Japan and China, gathering somewhere in the range of 30 million downloads. A component story from The New York Times in July, which clarified that Snow and Naver were misusing Snapchat's clear absence of enthusiasm for Asia, just served to increase familiarity with the application.

At some point after that story, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg got twist of Snow and reached Naver Chairman Hae-Jin Lee via telephone with an offer to obtain it. Naver saw Line bring over $1 billion up in a double Japan-U.S. Initial public offering in July of this current year, and Lee rejected Facebook's suggestions since he trusts Snow can possibly turn into a comparative achievement.

For sure, Naver reinforced ties between the two administrations in September when Line made a $45 million interest in Snow that gave the social application a valuation of $180 million — not terrible for a one-year-old venture. With Line attempting to develop its userbase outside of its biggest markets of Japan, Thailand and Taiwan, Snow is seen as a key partner that could help the visit application widen its allure in more parts of Asia.

While it is anything but difficult to name Snow as a Snapchat clone, the application has some separated elements.

For a certain something, Naver has endeavored to restrict the administration in business sectors, similarly as it did with Line when the talk application rose in 2011-2012. Most eminently, it is working with big names in Korea and Japan, where it sees the most footing and potential, to include their stories conspicuously inside the application close by live streams, as well. That energizes clients once again into the application for a bigger number of reasons than essentially to message their companions, while it additionally may open adapt alternatives later on.

The application itself has more than 36 channels and more than 200 covers, offering extensively more customization alternatives than Snapchat — a move that is in accordance with engaging its center gathering of people in Asia. A few alternatives incorporate channels for both pictures and recordings that include famous people, toon characters, pixies and even one scene as a tanked 'pay man' making a toast.

Snapchat — now simply "Snap" — is broadly answered to prepare for an IPO one year from now that could esteem the organization at around $25 billion. The most recent proposal is that it could raise $4 billion from a posting.

Those figures absolutely vindicate CEO Evan Spiegel's choice to dismiss a $3 billion offer from Facebook three years back — regardless of the possibility that standard way of thinking at the time proposed he was committing an error.

It is still early days for Snow, and it stays to be seen whether this will be another application that Facebook will regret passing up a great opportunity for after some time.

For the present, Facebook is attempting to transform its own particular properties into Snapchat-like contenders utilizing substantial measurements of 'item motivation'.

Instagram Stories, an element that the organization concedes is motivated by Snapchat, achieved an exceptionally respectable 100 million clients inside two months, while Facebook has propelled littler undertakings that incorporate a social video application that is only for high schoolers, a Snapchat-like camera highlight, and a genuinely unmitigated Snapchat clone that is being tried in Poland.