Snap is slowly growing, but it’s banking on augmented reality to sustain it
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Snap’s future depends on how well it builds its augmented reality platform. The company announced in its quarterly earnings call today that it added more users — 7 million in the last quarter — and generated more money, but it’s still unprofitable and lags far behind other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram in terms of user base size. Instagram’s ephemeral Stories product counts 500 million users per day as of January this year, while Snapchat counts 210 million daily active users total.
Still, in his prepared remarks, CEO Evan Spiegel detailed how important AR will be for the company’s future. Spiegel says every daily active user interacts with a Snap AR product nearly 30 times a day on average. These come in the form of AR...