THE snap, known for owning the Snapchat platform, for the first time in years recorded higher growth than rivals Meta (ex-Facebook) and Twitter. It’s true that Facebook has recorded a sharp drop in the company’s latest results, as well as Twitter for some time has been on a fine line between growing or staying stable, but this is still a milestone in the company’s history.
Just to remind you: last quarter, Meta registered 1 million fewer users in its base; while Twitter claimed to have a monetizable daily active user base (DAU) growing by 2% in the US and 15% internationally.
This Thursday (21), Evan Spiegel’s company released financial results for the first quarter of 2022 with an amount of DAUs 18% year on year, or a total of 332 million. In the previous five quarters, the growth in the user base was also significant, having exceeded 20%.
Main impacts on Snap’s revenue
The main concern of the company’s CFO, Derek Andersen, however, is with respect to revenue. Although they are not showing losses, the executive pointed out that many advertisers have paused campaigns due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Even though most of them resumed their activity just 10 days later, they still point out that the action had significant negative impacts on the total amount expected.
Still, Snap saw 38% year-over-year growth to a total of $1.06 billion. The pre-war forecast between the countries, however, was for growth of 44% in the period from the first quarter of 2021 to date.
“We believe that the impact of the war in Ukraine on input costs, marketing budgets and overall economic competence has been significant, and it is difficult to predict its impact based on the future,” Andersen said in the earnings call.
The change in privacy policies in Apple’s system was also another big item that impacted the company, according to Andersen.
The Cupertino giant modified its policies to offer iOS users the option to opt out of app tracking, and as a result, most users opted out of handing over their personal data – and this impacted not only Snap, but a number of other companies that rely on this type of information to sell targeted ads.
Image: playback/Snap
Despite this, the company is positive and continues to bet especially on the augmented reality market with Spectacles and other AR and VR features. The company claims that around 250 million users engage with augmented reality features daily.
Also next week, the company plans to announce new products and services at the Snap Partner Summit event — which could attract even more users to its base.
Via: TechCrunch
