As part of its Q1 2024 earnings release, Snap revealed that total watch time on TikTok competitor Spotlight increased by more than 125% year-over-year. Snapchat launched a TikTok-like feed in late 2020 as a way to compete with the growing popularity of TikTok. The company is touting the success of its short video feed, a day after President Biden signed legislation that would ban TikTok if its Chinese parent company ByteDance fails to sell it within a year.
According to Snap, overall time spent watching content increased year-over-year worldwide, primarily due to an increase in total time spent watching Spotlight and creator stories. The company says it has built more sophisticated ranking models over the past year to drive increased content engagement.
The app had 422 million daily active users in Q1 2024, an increase of 39 million or 10% year over year. His Snapchat+ subscriber count also more than tripled year-over-year, bringing his subscriber count to over 9 million in the quarter.
Snap noted that the number of ML and AI lenses viewed by users increased by more than 50% year-over-year, and plans to continue investing in generative AI models for creating lenses on the platform.
The company's revenue for the quarter rose 21% to $1.195 million, returning to double-digit growth. In a letter to investors, Snap attributed the growth to improvements to its advertising platform and increased demand for direct response (DR) advertising solutions. The company says the number of small and medium-sized advertisers on Snapchat has increased by 85% year over year.
Snap stock rose more than 26% in extended trading Thursday.
The company, which laid off 10% of its workforce in February, now says it expects the number of employees to increase “moderately into 2024.”
Snap's earnings release came a day after Meta reported 27% growth in the first quarter. However, Meta's stock price fell sharply following a weak earnings outlook and an “aggressive” investment plan in AI.