Strong Snap Q1 Sees Usage & Revenue Up

After a 2018 to forget, Snapchat is finally rocking and rolling again, with both usage and revenue up for the plucky camera company.

Snapchat posted its first daily user growth in over a year. Adding 4 million daily active users (DAUs) in the first quarter of 2019, bringing its total to 190 million.

Snap reported $320 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2019, a 39% year-over-year increase.

After a year of users whinging about its redesign and Facebook ‘borrowing’ its best features, Snap has come out swinging, releasing a raft of new features aimed at users and advertisers alike.  

At the Snap Partner summit last month, a bullish Snap CEO Evan Spiegel claimed Snapchat was the best way to reach Gen Z:

‘We each more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia.’

In its recent earnings, published last week, it doubled down on this, reiterating that it reaches 90% of all 13 to 24-year-olds in the U.S. and 75% of 13 to 34-year-olds.

Shaking The Google Android Gorilla Off Its Back

Aside from feature cloning by Instagram, Snapchat’s main impediment to progress, in recent times, has been its under-performing Android app.

Its weak Android app has been a long-running open wound for Snapchat, with a poor UX churning and burning users since at least 2017.

Considering that Google Android has around 74% market share of the global mobile phone market, this should perhaps have been addressed sooner.

Admittedly iOs users are typically more lucrative, but still, Android users are hardly plebs.

Not all of them anyway 😉

Android is nowadays the dominant mobile operating system in most western markets:

• US
  • Android: 54.2%
  • iOs: 44.8%
• UK
  • Android: 49.9%
  • iOs: 49.28%
• Australia:
  • Android: 56.5%
  • iOs: 43.1%
• New Zealand
  • Android: 52.3 %
  • iOs: 46.43%

Its latest iteration, launched literally a few weeks ago, is already showing positive upswing, with Spiegel last week noting:

‘There are billions of Android devices in the world that now have access to an improved Snapchat experience, and we look forward to being able to grow our Snapchat community in new markets.’

New Snap Marketing Opportunities & Growth Beyond Its Borders

Snapchat has been working on building out its marketing solutions for some time now. With improvements on targeting, analytics and creative all rolling out within the last year.

That said, uptake with media buyers is weak, with Snap leadership claiming few agency people ‘get’ the platform.

Therefore, Snapchat is looking for new routes to market, announcing on Tuesday a new tie-in with Shopify for Snap Ads.

For Story Ads in Snapchat, merchants can now curate their own branded content experience for their customers by installing the Snapchat Ads App.

With the creation of a branded Tile in Snapchat’s Discover section, users will be able to unlock a collection of Snaps (anywhere between 3-20 Snaps) featuring that specific merchant’s products, and merchants can track sales resulting from that Story Ad with the Snap Pixel.

Inevitably there will be similar integrations to come, as Snap explores more indirect routes to access marketing dollars and users.

It launched a nascent ecommerce partnership with Amazon in late 2018, and has recently announced Story tie-in with Tinder, a Bitmoji integration with Fitbit and now Bitmoij for Games.

After a 2018 spent on the backfoot, that cheeky ol’ ghost is ready to rumble again.