Snapchat is finally profitable and has more users than ever | TechTree.com

Snapchat is finally profitable and has more users than ever

Five years after going public, Snapchat recorded its first profit. Much of Snapchat’s growth came from India, where TikTok is banned.

 

Snapchat shared the milestone in its Q4 earnings report, where the company earned $23 million in net income.

That is a tiny percentage of its $4.1 billion Q4 revenue, but it’s a great step given that Snapchat has struggled with user growth. 

That challenge may finally be behind Snapchat, as DAUs (daily active users) climbed to 319 million, an increase of 13 million for a second straight quarter. DAUs were up 20% overall in 2021.

The news was welcomed by shareholders as Snapchat’s results came a day after Meta reported that Facebook’s DAUs had decreased for the first time. Facebook stocks slid by 20% while Snapchat’s stock shot up by more than 50%. 

Snapchat has also complained about Apple’s privacy changes, just like Facebook did recently, but unlike Facebook, Snapchat has figured out how to navigate those changes more easily, at least for now. 

CFO Derek Andersen credited Snapchat’s privacy-centric approach.

“We built our business with privacy by design at the core of our products, including our advertising platform. As a result, the impacts of the changes that we've seen on the iOS platform are likely to be experienced differently for business than perhaps for others.” CFO Derek Andersen on Snapchat’s privacy-centric approach. 

Derek Andersen also added that Snapchat was still “very early in the journey.”

 “We are seeing people post fewer Stories to their friends, view fewer Stories from their friends. But at the same time we've seen folks watching more premium content, watching more content in Spotlight.” CEO Evan Spiegel on how the pandemic has changed user behaviour.

Spotlight, Snapchat's TikTok-like feature for very short videos, has helped grow Snapchat's creator community. More than 12,000 creators have received payouts from Spotlight in the first year. 

“Today we see three times as many monthly posts per creator than we did when Spotlight launched a year ago.” - Evan Spiegel


TAGS: Snapchat, TikTok

 
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