Its latest valuation from a recent funding round put it as a $16bn company, the same figure it was valued at in May 2015, and came after some investors had cut their predictions for the company’s until now phenomenal growth. The popularity of the service comes at a crucial moment for the company. Snapchat confirmed that weddings, events and local business ads are the most popular on-demand geofilters so far. Webb notes the paid filter trend comes from Purikura, which were photo sticker booths with personal filters made popular in Japan about 15 to 20 years ago. “Snapchat would be the first social media company that has developed a profit center that is really intended to scale through lots of individual users, rather than selling services or products to companies,” said Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute. Of those thousands of submissions, 40% of them are coming from individuals, meaning businesses are already the largest users of the service. Snapchat – which now has 100 million active users a day – launched its on-demand service in February for both individuals and businesses, and although they won’t get too specific about numbers since it’s tied to revenue, a Snapchat spokesperson confirmed the company is getting thousands of on-demand geofilters submissions every week.

The price is based on the time the geofilter is available – from an hour to 30 days – and the geographical area chosen, ranging from a building to a few city blocks. Starting at $5 and going into the thousands, Snappers can design and buy a personalized short-term geofilter (location-based graphics on top of videos and photos) to put for events, such as a cartoon “Gloria’s 21st” or “Happy wedding, Jon + Jerome”. Businesses are piling in too and Snapchat – alone among the new generation of social media apps – appears to have found a way to earn revenue directly from everyday users by getting them to pay to create their own content.

Custom snapchat geotag