At its Investor Day event on Thursday, Snap shared a handful of new metrics about its business and teased its prospects. In particular, he said that his social networking app Snapchat has now grown to more than 750 million monthly active users. Although the number is well below the approx. 2.96 billion monthly active users, which Facebook reported earlier this month, is ahead of others, including Pinterest, which recently said it hit 450 million monthly users.
However, it’s unclear where Snap stands vis-à-vis Twitter, which is no longer a publicly traded company following its acquisition of Elon Musk. In addition, Twitter’s public figures prior to the deal closing had used a different metric: the Twitter-invented metric called mDAU, or monetizable monthly active users. This was meant to indicate the number of users on Twitter who would actually see their ads, Twitter said. That number was 237.8 million as of final public earnings in July 2022, which was lower than Snapchat’s. now 375 million daily users.
TikTok, for its part, announced its One billion monthly active users milestone in 2021 and it was forecast to reach 1.8 billion by the end of 2022.
Additionally, Snap shared that of its 750 million monthly active users, 150 million were in North America.
During the event, Snap also teased its newest offerings in terms of products, including its 3D Snap map and a recently released feature called communities. The latter is aimed at private groups where members can add friends and post to a shared campus story. The feature launched with colleges and high schools and will roll out to more communities over time. So far, there are more than 1,400 universities in the US with access to Communities, the company said.
He also touted the success of his $3.99-a-month paid subscription, Snapchat+, which now has 2.5 million subscribers, a more accurate figure than the more than 2 million announced during earnings.
Of course, what investors want to hear is how Snap is handling the competitive landscape, including the threat from TikTok, how its investments in its ad business will help fuel growth, and whether it can offer any guidance going forward. That can come later in the day.
Snap said its main short-term advertising focus is direct response (DR) advertising, which accounts for about two-thirds of its business and is growing at a faster rate than its brand-oriented business. His DR’s platform was the primary driver of its ad revenue CAGR of more than 50% in the 5-year period ending 2021.
It also shared that its TikTok competitor, Spotlight, is attracting less than half of its total monthly active users, as 300 million users interact with the feature each month. However, the company noted that interest in this product continued to grow. In the fourth quarter, the Total time spent viewing Spotlight more than doubled from the previous year, and Spotlight submissions increased nearly 20% over the same time period.
In the early part of the event, Snap also shared a host of other metrics with investors, including several recently announced during earnings.
These included:
- Snap’s community outside of North America and Europe has grown by more than 80% since Q4 2020
- 95% year-over-year increase in daily new users who have 3 or more friends
- Snapchat users who talk to at least three friends over the course of a month retain more than 90% in the following month, on average
- Snapchat users share memories with friends 280 million times a day, on average
- For the 5 years after a user’s first year on the service, annualized retention is about 90%, on average
- US users open Snapchat almost 40 times a day on average; More than 60% of users who open Snapchat every day create Snaps
- Over 5 billion Snaps created every day, on average
- 88% of users who use Snap or chat with a friend will use the app every day for the next 7 days
- The Snapchat map is used by more than 300 million users per month; Daily users of the map open the map 6 times per day on average
- In the fourth quarter, total time spent viewing Spotlight more than doubled from the prior year, with Spotlight submissions increasing nearly 20% over the same time period
- 2 out of 3 users interact with AR daily; More than 70% of users who download the app interact with AR during their first day in the app
- The number of users with at least 1 friend Story to watch has increased 15% year-over-year
- Time spent per view in the US for both Creator Stories and Spotlight grew by “big” double-digit percentages in the fourth quarter compared to last year
- Snapchat users who subscribed to new creators through Spotlight increased 225% and the total number of daily subscriptions increased 240%.
- In India, time spent on Spotlight more than tripled and time spent watching shows increased more than 55% by 2022
- Media partners in more than 20 countries, 10 languages, including NBCU, Disney/ESPN, Channel 4 and MBC, sports leagues like the NFL and NBA, digital natives like Team Whistle and Jellysmack, and news brands like The Washington Post, Axios and Axel Jumper.
- Spotlight reaches more than 300 million users a month
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