Despite sounding pretty screwed during its second-ever investor call today, Snapchat had a teeny nugget of good news to share. “Our dancing hot dog is likely the world’s very first augmented reality superstar,” said billionaire Snap CEO Evan Spiegel on a webcast with investors. The dancing dog has been seen more than 1.5 billion times inside the app, Spiegel said, which is fun news indeed!
Image: Snap/Gizmodo
On to the not-so-fun news: Snap’s daily user growth is not humming along like it once was. Around the time Instagram cloned Snapchat’s marquee features, things started going south.
Can you guess when FB and Instagram started to clone Snapchat’s features? pic.twitter.com/vxFLXNoPG6
— Kurt Wagner (@KurtWagner8) August 10, 2017
But Snapchat is still very much a thing, with 173 million daily users. Like Twitter, Snapchat’s problem isn’t that it isn’t popular — it just isn’t growing as fast as investors want it to. But unlike Twitter, Snapchat did manage to add 7.3 million new daily users in the last three months.
On top of all this, Snap is losing gobs of money: $US443.1 million ($564.8 million) last quarter. Dancing frankfurters don’t come cheap. The app’s advertising revenue is growing — Snap made $US181.7 million ($231.2 million) last quarter — but the company still fell short of analysts’ estimates.
To reassure skittish investors, Snap cofounders Spiegel and Bobby Murphy pledged to not sell their shares this year. The stock, by the way, fell by over 16 per cent in after-hours trading this evening.
As for Snap’s $US443.1 million ($564.8 million) loss — for that kind of change, Spiegel could buy himself over 100 million hot dogs at $5 a piece on a nice day out. Though they probably wouldn’t be nearly as nice as a breakdancing hot dog.