Google tried to trump Facebook by offering $4 billion for Snapchat

Even as the social networking world was digesting the fact that Facebook reportedly tried to take over Snapchat for a tidy sum of $3 billion – triple of what it paid to pick up Instagram – it is now being reported that Google too threw its hat in the ring. Google apparently tried to trump Facebook with its offer of $4 billion but Snapchat’s CEO turned down this offer as well.

The rumours first emerged when GigaOm’s Om Malik tweeted about Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel cold shouldering Google’s offer. According to Valleywag, the first company to offer Snapchat the termsheet was WeChat creator Tencent. The Chinese company was willing to offer a valuation of anywhere between $3 billion to $4 billion. Then came Facebook and Google with similar quotes.

Tencent bowed out of the deal when Spiegel demanded a higher valuation. The CEO then courted the attention of both Facebook and Google. He took Facebook’s $3 billion offer and went off to Google to see if it could match the social networking website’s offer. After this running around and piquing of interests, Spiegel finally decided that he wanted to wait till 2014 to raise funding for the self-destructing messaging service he heads.

Reports seem to suggest that it is the winter and holiday traffic that Snapchat seems to be looking at right now. Essentially, Snapchat is now seeing 250 million snaps a day. The holiday season in the west not only sees a push in the number of new phones sold but also a surge in photo sharing applications as well as social networking. Snapchat seems to be eyeing to break the 400 million snaps per day ceiling. With this number, it would surpass the number of photos uploaded daily on Facebook and will be able to show it off, demanding a more premium price.

What's up Spiegel's mind?

Spiegel had been looking at Google for some “strategic investment”, but unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have worked out. If Snapchat and Google had struck a deal, the latter was planning to keep the app as a standalone one, quite like what Facebook did with Instagram. Of course, neither Google nor Snapchat has commented on this matter. We’ll have to wait till early next year to see what Spiegel does as far as raising funding for Snapchat goes.