Snapchat said to be looking at $300M in revenue this year

The company relies on advertising, but has also been dabbling in commerce

Last week, Snapchat raised a $175 million round, though its valuation stayed the same. That's typically not a good sign for a big company but it was actually a good thing in this current economy. And a little surprising, frankly, considering how down the market has been so far this year.

Now we may know why investors were so keen on the company: it is apparently on track to make a substantial amount of revenue this year.

Snapchat expects to seen somewhere between $300 million and $350 million in revenue in 2016, according a report from Re/Code on Monday.

That's certainly much better than it was doing a couple of years ago, when leaked documents showed the company making $3.1 million in 2014, with a net loss of $128 million, with $47 million of it going toward the company's product development.

Of course, a lot has changed for Snapchat since then. Those documents showed what was happened at the company right before it started running ads in October of 2014. While advertising is likely Snapchat's biggest moneymaker, as it is for so many other social networks, the company has dabbled in other revenue streams as well.

One area has been commerce, selling its users extra features, such as paid replays, which allow users to rewatch content for a fee. Not all of these efforts have worked out, though. For example, the company launched the lenses store in November, charging users 99 cents to permanently buy one of 30 available lenses. Snapchat shut down the project in January, instead focusing on branding efforts.

That is the same thing that it did with its Discover feature as well, by selling sponsored channels. In October, Snapchat unveiled its first sponsored Discover channel, for Spectre, which included a video from stars Dave Bausista and Lea Seydoux and behind the scenes footage.

Most recently it was revealed that Snapchat is going to be adding something akin to a buy button, allowing users to buy goods directly from inside the Snapchat app. 

The company hit a $100 million revenue run rate in the fourth quarter of last year, and had previously projected revenue of only $50 million in 2016.

In addition, Snapchat is also said to be working on an API to make it even easier for advertisers to show their ads on the platform.

With its revenue growing, you have to wonder if Snapchat could become the big IPO that Wall Street is looking for this year.

VatorNews reached out to SnapChat but a spokesperson declined to comment on this report. 

(Image source: nypost.com)