Category: Data-Labor-Technology Stories

Olympics fans in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia will soon have a way to catch up with the 2018 Winter Olympics without looking down at their phones during their commute. Later this week, NBC Olympics will begin showcasing content from Pyeongchang, South Korea–videos and visuals such as highlights, summaries, previews, medal counts and athlete bios–on…

Don’t call it a comeback just yet, but Snap’s broken its losing streak.

For the first time, Snap beat industry and Wall Street expectations for daily user growth and quarterly revenues. For the full year of 2017, Snap earned $824.9 million in revenue. The company continues to lose money, but things are certainly looking brighter for Snap today than yesterday. Here’s what you need to know from Snap’s earnings:

The key numbers:

• 187 million daily users (+8.9 million from previous quarter)
• $285.6 million in quarterly revenue (+$77.6 million)
• $1.53 average revenue per user (+.36 cents)
• $350 million in losses in the fourth quarter
• More than 90 percent of Snap Ads were bought programmatically last quarter
• $100 million in revenue generated for Snapchat content partners in 2017

 

About that redesign…
During Snap’s third-quarter earnings call this past fall, Spiegel admitted that Snapchat was hard to use, one of the reasons the app hasn’t taken off the way investors and analysts hoped (the other, bigger reason: Facebook). Since announcing a redesign that would separate user posts and messages from media content, Snap has been quiet on when the new changes will launch.

Spiegel said the initial tests on the redesign have been promising. In one of the first test markets, daily users for Snapchat Discover channels grew by 40 percent following the redesign, he said. The full rollout is coming sometime in the first quarter.

Thinking emoji:
According to Spiegel: “Every week, on average, more than half of the entire 13-34-year-old population of the United States plays with augmented reality Lenses in Snapchat.”

More stories everywhere:
After noting how Snap is now making its stories available outside of Snapchat, Spiegel said: “We’ve also started bringing Snaps to bigger screens like stadium jumbotrons at this year’s Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl. Removing friction from the way people use Snapchat and view Snaps will help us continue to grow our community over the coming year.”

Keep in mind:
The majority of Snap’s revenue is generated through brand advertising, which seasonally peaks in the fourth quarter, Snap CFO Drew Vollero said. Snap is also transitioning the creative tools business to the programmatic platform, which it believes will drive additional impressions at lower prices and result in more modest growth in the first half of 2018.

Goodbye, Spectacles:
In the first quarter of 2017, Snap made $8 million from Spectacles revenue, which it expects to be “substantially down year-over-year.”

What Wall Street was expecting:
Wall Street, already bearish on Snap, expected Snapchat to add six million new daily users last quarter and revenue of $253 million, according to Recode. Snap beat both expectations by substantial margins. Unsurprisingly, Snap shares skyrocketed by as much as 29 percent following the earnings release — which should give Snap a bit of a cover until it has to beat expectations once again in three months.

The Android factor:
This is the most Snapchat has grown daily users since Instagram copied the app with Instagram Stories. CEO Evan Spiegel attributed some of the user growth to improvements Snapchat made to its Android app; the retention rate of new Snapchat users on Android increased by 20 percent over the previous year, he said.

Everyone is as surprised as you:

Holy Toledo — $SNAP is up 23% on earnings!

— alexei oreskovic (@lexnfx) February 6, 2018

 

The post Snap finally has some good news to share appeared first on Digiday.

When you hear a poem in an ad, especially a Super Bowl ad, it’s usually a safe and licensed choice lifted from the long-dead likes of Whitman or Frost. But Coca-Cola went a different direction with its Super Bowl ad, building it instead around a lovely and original poem about inclusiveness, identity, individuality and, yes,…

AdExchanger |

Snap finally snapped out of its earnings slump on Tuesday as it beat analyst expectations for both revenue and daily active user growth. Revenue in 2017 reached $825 million, a 104% increase from the year before, while 2017 Q4 revenue grew 72% to roughly $286 million, topping analysts’ quarterly estimates of $253 million. Daily active… Continue reading »

The post Snap Posts Its First Strong Quarter Since Going Public Last Year appeared first on AdExchanger.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are jumping from one storied Hollywood franchise into an even bigger one. After the Game of Thrones creators finish the HBO drama’s final season, which will air next year, they’ll write and produce a new series of Star Wars films, Lucasfilm announced today. The new Star Wars films will be…

If someone told you they were going to make a film about how difficult it can be to see the world from someone else’s perspective, using different camera rigs as a way into each perspective, that might seem like a complicated, even worrisome conceit. How can you make a film about the difficulty of understanding…

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket on its initial test flight, marking another historic coup for founder Elon Musk.

MoonPie knows its way around Twitter. But judging from the scripts it whipped up this week–curiously timed to a certain major football game being played–we’d like to see the brand try a TV commercial pronto. During Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast, in a very “If We Made It” style stunt, the marshmallow-cookie brand posted a handful…

Apple, responding to U.S. Senate questions about its decision to slow performance on older iPhones, said it is considering rebates for battery replacements for some users affected by the issue.

It’s a touchdown for Fanatics, which had its best Super Bowl ever, thanks to merchandise sales (and a surprise underdog win from the Philadelphia Eagles). Fanatics, NFL’s ecommerce partner for the past 12 years, used Facebook and Instagram to promote and sell Eagles merchandise as soon as the game ended. Overall, the company saw Super…