It’s a question almost every student with a study break and a front-facing camera has attempted to answer: If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then what’s the asking price for a six-second up-the-nose selfie with the ugliest Evanston-related geofilter slapped on top? A good chunk of money. Even though news broke last month that one of Snapchat Inc.’s big investors lowered the value of its stake in the company by 25 percent, the company’s still worth about $12 billion, and it continues to grow.

In 2015, Snapchat’s a far cry from its days as a germ of an idea that originated between a few friends on Stanford University’s campus four years ago. Just last year the platform increased by more than half, and it’s now grown to have an estimated 200 million daily users. In January, it rolled out Discover, a section of the app that’s dedicated to displaying content from a select number of media outlets - places like Cosmopolitan, ESPN, Comedy Central and National Geographic have joined the Snapchat squad thus far. And, in September, the company introduced Lenses, the handy little feature that has let users take selfies with interactive filters on them. You can thank the team headed by Snapchat’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, for cornering the market when it comes to choosing between sending a video of yourself looking about 50 years older or puking an animated rainbow.

2015 was good to Spiegel too. Way better than his last year, at least. The 25-year-old landed on the Forbes 400 list as the world’s youngest billionaire, and he was the cover story for L’Uomo Vogue’s October issue. Lucky for us, Snapchat’s the only place where photos like this one are temporary.