Snapchat Tumbles Down In The Stock Market

Snap Inc., which is the parent company of popular photo sharing app Snapchat, has reported stalling user numbers and tumbling profits in its second quarter results. The social media company has had a very difficult ride in the stock market losing up to 14% in trading in a single day.

The company priced its Initial Public Offering (IPO) at $ 17 and then reached heights of $ 27. But since then, it has fallen to half of that, closing at $ 11.83 on Friday. While the company announced their audience grew by over 20% since last year to reach 173 million daily active users, they lost close to $ 443 million in the June quarter.

The CEO of Snap, Evan Spiegel has always defended the company’s decision to not make user growth it’s primary mission but the success of Instagram Stories has halted the growth of Snapchat. According to media reports, the Stories feature on Instagram already has 250 million daily users which is over 75 million more than Snapchat.

As per Snap’s second quarter filings, the company brought in $ 181.7 million in revenue which is a 153% increase since last year. But the company missed the analysts expectations who were expecting a revenue of more than $ 186 million.

Snapchat popularized disappearing messages and came up with the idea for stories along with the clever use of AI enhanced face filters. But Facebook has proven to be a fierce competitor as it understands how to get more and more people to sign up and keep using their services. In an attempt to get more users involved with the app on a daily basis, Snapchat also encouraged the daily use of Snapstreak. But Snapstreak, which calls out the streaks in which two friends send snaps to each other at least once for more than three consecutive days, isn’t working too well, as daily users haven’t grown much. In order to survive in the industry, Snapchat and the team will have to come up with something that can’t be so easily replicated by other social media giants.