You've probably heard about Snapchat by now, but how much do you really know about popular platform?

Snapchat's premise is simple: users send each another content such as photos, videos, text and drawings, known as “Snaps”.

Unlike a tweet, which theoretically lives forever, Snaps are live anywhere from one to 10 seconds, after which they are hidden from the recipients device and deleted from Snapchat's servers.

Often billed as the playground for teens sending images they don't want their Facebook-using parents to see, there's a lot more to Snapchat than selfies. While hard stats on Snapchat are hard to find, here's what we've been able to dig up on this emerging social superpower.

It's a snap

Snapchat was launched in September 2011 by Stanford University students Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy.

While Snapchat has not released official figures on how many users it has, most estimates put the figure between 10 – 20 million.

Social not sharing

Snapchat has revealed that the service is most popular with 13 – 25 year olds.

There are 400 million snaps sent every day, however only 12 per cent of these are sent to multiple users.

Female friendly

Over 70 per cent of Snapchat users are women, making it the second most female-friendly platform after Pinterest (of which 80 per cent of users are female).

Three billion

In a widely reported case, Snapchat turned down an offer to be bought out by Facebook for US$3 billion.

Facebook then proceeded to purchase Snapchat competitor WhatsApp for a cool US$21 billion.

Stay tuned to see who comes up trumps in the messaging market.

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