• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, January 2, 2015

Snapchat was supposed to be dead by 2013, or by 2014 at the latest. Either way, it was supposed to be long forgotten by 2015 -- especially after it turned down a multi-billion-dollar offer from Facebook.

Instead, the photo messaging app rang in 2015 with a fresh $486 million.

A regulatory filing appeared on New Year’s Eve revealing that Snapchat has raised $486 million from undisclosed investors. It’s a major round of funding for the major enigma.

Snapchat rose side-by-side with “real-time marketing” via social media, but rarely does one see a “Real-Time Marketing [Fail or Win]” headline involving Snapchat. Some ingredients, however, are in place.

“Real-time marketing” typically involves a live event, and Snapchat has done a fair amount to incorporate major pop culture happenings inside its app; the timeline is currently inundated with New Years and college football stories, for example.

Snapchat is also “dark social” epitomized, and “dark social” -- the sharing of content behind doors (i.e. email, SMS, forum posts, Snapchat) -- is on the rise. Recent reports found that “dark social” accounts for as much as 70% of social sharing, though consumers believe they share 32% of their content in the “dark” -- indicating a divide between what consumers think and how they behave.

And while Snapchat has some real-time marketing ingredients already in place, “dark social” and real-time marketing do not seem to mesh. Dark social is about private or anonymized sharing; real-time marketing is in your face, begging to be publicly shared and talked about. Dark social lends itself to honesty; real-time marketing is canned and guarded. These factors, combined with a lack of sharing, favoriting or saving options within Snapchat, have potentially held the app back from being a real-time marketing magnet.

Yet the nearly half-billion round of funding -- which the Financial Times reports values the company at $10 billion -- suggests Snapchat’s story is far from over. If marketers can crack the dark social code, 2015 may be Snapchat’s time in the social sun.