Alright, so in light of Snapchat about to go public, the people over at qz.com, wrote up a very interesting article about the company's profitability or the huge lack there of, claiming that they're actually following in the footsteps of Twitter's massive tendencies to lose huge amounts of money. Apparently, it is extremely expensive to run a social media company like Snapchat. While it may be fun for the end user. If you decide to become an investor, you might not be smiling so much.

All that cash, gone!

They claim that in 2016, the company's IPO filings revealed that they lost over a freaking $500 million dollars!

And it doesn't stop there as the report goes on to reveal that their growth may be tapering off, meaning they're not growing their user database. Also, their rivals like Instagram are launching rival services faster than they can come up with them. They even admitted in their IPO filings that they might not ever achieve or maintain profitability. If that's not a huge red flag for an investor, then I don't know what is.

Video ads could save them

There is one bright side with Snapchat's business model. And that's the fact that video ads generate the most amount of revenue. Since they are almost entirely a video-sharing and watching platform, that could bode well for them. They've also announced, trying to deliver original content to their platform with a version of BBC’s very popular "Planet Earth" nature series.

Here are some more positives

Another upside that the company mentioned, is how much time its users spend on their app, claiming they get over 2.5 billion snaps a day and that their average user visits it about 18 times a day, spending about 25 to 30 minutes on it every day. The videos are also constructed more like television as opposed to the ones on Facebook and Twitter feeds.

So, if Snapchat can find a way to create a healthy advertising stream out of its app without pissing off its users, they might actually see some sort of profit one day. However, that is a big "might."

Their sunglasses aren't doing well either

On more of the bad news front, the company also mentioned that they didn't really generate a lot of revenue from their recent spectacles offering, which are those video-recording sunglasses.

So basically, Snapchat really needs to focus on trying to make some sort of advertising on their network, work for advertisers, or it could be game over for them. Wow, I still can't get over that $500 million in losses in a year. Stay tuned.