Not long ago, Snap the parent company of Snapchat, never believed they would survive as a standalone company. They were facing stiff competition from Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter to a point that its stock price bottomed out around $5 after a disastrous redesign that slowed user growth and confused advertisers.
The situation is much different now. Snapchat is growing faster than it has since 2017, the year it went public. On Thursday, the camera-based messaging app said it added 13 million daily users during the second quarter, a 23 percent increase from the year-ago period.
That means 293 million people use Snapchat every day around the world, up from 173 million this time four years ago. (Twitter reported 206 million daily users in the second quarter, by comparison.) Snap’s revenue also soared 116 percent to $982 million, making it a faster-growing business than Twitter or Facebook.
The new numbers solidify one of the most impressive turnaround stories in tech. They also reflect how tech companies have benefited throughout the pandemic as people increasingly spend more time online.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has said he expects the app’s user base to actually grow faster as pandemic lockdowns end since Snapchat is designed to be used out and about with friends.
Most of Snap’s user growth in the second quarter came from outside its core markets mostly from Africa and Asia. That means Snap has lots of work ahead to monetize its new users effectively. This quarter’s results also benefitted from a delayed rollout of Apple’s changes to data tracking in iOS 14, which makes third-party developers show prompt asking permission to track users across different apps.
