The latest quarterly revealed a growth, in the USA, in terms of daily active users, higher than that of Twitter and Meta: the revenues, however, must be fleshed out and, for this purpose, a test has started to bring advertising into short videos by Spotlight.
The famous photo-sharing platform Snapchat has recently released the data of its latest quarterly, the first of 2022, revealing a picture between lights and shadows, with some adjustments to be made in terms of revenue, perhaps introducing advertising also in videos shorts published in Spotlight.
The first news related to Snapchat concerns the fresh revealing of its first quarterly of 2022. According to the financial director of the parent company (Snap Inc), Derek Andersen, the platform is growing more than its closest rivals headquartered in the USA, as Meta in the ‘last quarter of 2021 had the first decline in users in its history, while Twitter grew 15% internationally and 2% in the United States, in terms of daily active users (DAU).
In particular, in the first quarter of 2022, the growth of daily active users was, year on year, of 18% (in the previous five quarters, however, it had reached 20%): the result brought to 332 million. users, 250 million of whom interact every day with the platform’s augmented reality functions, which could be enriched with other new features, both software and hardware, at the company’s next Snap Partner Summit.
A little less well is the revenue, which already in the third quarter of 2021 had to suffer from the new anti-tracking rules launched by iOS: specifically, even if it is about to reach + 44% compared to the first quarter of 2021 , to date, revenue has stalled at $ 1.06 billion, growing only 38% year-over-year, with the causes blamed on the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine, due to which many advertisers have suspended their ad campaigns with the consequence that, even if most of them reactivated them within 10 days, the damage (moreover difficult to foresee in full on a far-sighted basis) was nevertheless warned.
Precisely to remedy this, this is the second novelty, we intervened once again on advertising, after having introduced mid-roll ads in the Stories last December (between one video and another in the same) of some selected creators, which were able to participate in the revenue generated by advertising. According to a speech by CEO Evan Spiegel, held precisely on the occasion of the call with investors to comment on the data for the first quarter of 2022, the Snapchat platform has launched a limited test aimed at introducing advertisements also in TikTok-style short videos that the company supports in the Spotlight hub. The idea would come after noticing that many creators, to get more users willing to follow their Stories and have a greater distribution, had also landed on Spotlight, publishing short videos.