• by Colin Kirkland , April 26, 2024

According to the social media company’s first-quarter results, Snapchat has added users and improved its revenue performance, while also providing more opportunities for its advertising partners as it continues to invest in AI and augmented reality.

With 422 million daily active users, Snapchat added 8 million users since the previous period -- marking an increase of 10% year-over-year.

However, while the company has grown in emerging markets, its plan to build a larger user base in the U.S. and EU -- which would bring in more revenue for the app -- has not panned out, with these regions remaining flat over the past year.

In terms of revenue, Snap accumulated $1.195 billion over the past year, marking a strong increase of 21%.

The company says this happened faster than it had anticipated and was largely driven by its advertising platform and an increase in demand for its direct-response advertising solutions.

In addition, Snap says that machine-learning models are driving significant results for small and medium-sized advertisers.

“In Q1, ongoing momentum with our 7-0 Pixel Purchase optimization model -- which enables advertisers to bid for attributed 7-day click-through conversions -- led to a more than 75% increase in purchase-related conversions year-over-year,” the company said in a statement, adding that it will expand testing of its capabilities to support value optimization and custom event optimization in the second quarter.

Overall, the company has spent the past year trying to attract more advertising partners with a variety of new products and safety guidelines, including Sponsored AR filters,, which launched last month, partnerships with Traackr, Lumen Research, OMD, Amplified Intelligence, and Fospha to offer advertisers more campaign tools and insights, and additional brand safety solutions via a partnership with Integral Ad Science.

Snapchat's small business advertisers grew 85% year-over-year, which the company attributes to easier advertising creation through its new version of Conversions API (CAPI) and a partnership with Snowflake, a data cloud provider.

The company also made progress with its subscription offering, Snapchat+, which grew from 5 million users in September 2023 to 9 million this quarter. At $3.99 per subscriber, it can estimated that Snap is now bringing in about $35 million per month from Snapchat+, which remains one of the strongest subscription offerings in the social media landscape.

Snap plans to reach 431 million daily active users in the second quarter, with revenue growth of 15% to 18% year-over-year.