Snapchat was rencently offered three billion dollars in cash from Facebook  and turned it down.

Web pundits since, have been debating how insane this idea actually was.

As John Herman of Buzzfeed observed yesterday, one reason analysts are struggling to understand Snapchat is that we don’t have much data on how the service is actually used.

All we know, as Herman summarizes, is:

• Snapchat users collectively receive 400 million “Snaps” a day
• 88% of these ‘snaps’ are sent to just one other person

The question on everyone’s tongues is how will Snapchat monetize itself to justify this offer with many people arguing online that this kind of action may mean we are right back in the “tech bubble”.

In its infancy, a lot of talk about Twitter was around the same argument, and now it is one of the larger success stories of recent years. The same was said of Facebook, and Google and….

One thing is for certain, Snapchat has a reasonable chance of becoming just as successful if it comes out with a clearly laid out plan for making money.