Photo and video sharing platform Snapchat is no longer losing daily active users.
At the same time, the platform is also no longer gaining new users but instead staying around the same level.
However, the company revealed that it is making more money than before with the active users it currently has on the platform. According to Snap's Q4 financial report, the app has 186m daily active users.
“In 2018, we focused on building a foundation to scale the business over the long-term by driving sustainable product innovation, scaling our advertising platform, and hiring the leadership team that will help us achieve our future goals, ”said Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.
“We ended the year with user engagement stabilizing and have started rolling out the new version of our Android application to a small percentage of our community. We are substantially closer to achieving profitability, as we have maintained a relatively flat cost structure across the past five quarters while growing full‐year revenue 43 percent year‐over‐year.”
Snap statistics at a glance
Here are some of the current financial stats for Snapchat according to the report, some of which are compared to the previous quarter’s performance for Snapchat. These are followed by the success of some of Snapchat's features and unique content.
- 79 million daily active users in North America (same as the previous quarter)
- $390 million quarterly revenue (up from $286.7 million the year prior)
- Full year revenue increased 43 per cent to $1.2 billion
- Average revenue per user is $2.09 (up from $1.53 the year prior)
- Net loss was $191.7 million (down from $350 million the year prior)
- Average iOS time by per user grew faster in Q4 2018 than Q4 2017
- Snap original show “Dead Girls Detective Agency” reached more than 14 million unique viewers
- Snap Pixel saw 600 million purchase events this quarter (up from 230 million last quarter)
- 70 per cent of users played with or viewed a Lens every day
- NBC News announced that two-thirds of the 25 to 35 million Snapchatters watching its Stay Tuned show represented a net new audience for them
Other interesting changes to come from this include the ads that users see when using Snapchat. More than double the advertising revenue was generated than last year, a lot of which was focused more towards 17 - 34-year-old users.
This affected the use of Snapchat Discover, where users were more active with publishing stories and shows compared to the previous year. Despite much of the criticism that Snapchat has gotten for all of its changes in last year, results seem to have evened out.
Snap also prided itself on creating more opportunities for monetisation, including 6-second non-skippable ads, and its premium content targeting tool which allows brands and agencies to fine tune their targeted audiences.
Q1 2019 outlook
Snap expects revenue for Q1 2019 to fall between $285 million and $310 million, or grow between 24% and 34% compared to Q1 2018.
