For the first time since the company was founded in 2011, Snap posted a decrease in the number of people that use Snapchat on a daily basis. 188 million people used the app daily in the second quarter of 2018, a 2% drop from last quarter.
Snap’s users are ghosting.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel pointed to the outsized response to Snapchat’s November redesign as the main reason for the dropoff in users, but competition from rivals like Instagram and friction from recent European privacy regulations likely also contributed to the decrease.
Investors initially chose to focus on the good news from Snap’s earnings report-a narrower loss and higher-than-expected revenue. Snap generated $262 million compared to the $250.4 million consensus estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.
This drove the share price up 13% to $14.60 in after-hours trading, but it soon fell back to earth as the call began, dropping to $13.18, right around the price at market’s close.
Unless Snap can figure out a way to keep users coming back day after day, pictures won’t be the only thing that disappear on the platform.
