Things are finally looking up for Snapchat. The company announced its fourth quarter and full year 2018 financial results and the last quarter of the year brought some good news for the company. While Snapchat continued to bleed money, it curtailed its losses to $158 million compared to $192 million a year ago. More importantly, the company managed to stop users from leaving its platform.

At the end of Q4 2018, Snapchat had 186 million daily active users, the same as in Q3 2018. This is down by 1 million users from Q4 2017 though. Even better, Snapchat saw a higher increase in the DAU of iOS users YoY and QoQ wise. iPhone users also spent more time inside Snaptchat during Q4 2018 than they did during Q4 2017.

The revamped UI of Snapchat had led to users leaving the platform since they were not fond of the design and found it too complicated. While Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel initially decided against rolling back the app to the old UI, the company did restore some of the behavioral changes from the previous app to stop the erosion of users. And now, the move is finally paying off. Snap says that 30 percent more people are watching stories and shows from Publishers than they did last year during the same quarter. The per-user consumption of such content has also gone up.

• 30% more people are now watching Publisher Stories and Shows every day compared to last year, and each person is consuming more of these Stories per day on average.
• In Q4 2018, more than 60% of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” audience tuned in three or more times per week.
• “Dead Girls Detective Agency,” a new Snap Original Show produced by our joint venture with NBCUniversal, reached more than 14 million unique viewers, and over 40% of the users that completed the first episode went on to watch the entire season.
• Bitmoji Stories, a new cartoon starring Snapchatters and their friends, reached over 40 million viewers in December.
• NBC News announced that two thirds of the 25 to 35 million Snapchatters watching its Stay Tuned show represented a net new audience for them.

Overall, things finally seem to be improving for Snap. After losing users continuously for quite a few quarters, Snap has finally managed to arrest that fall. The changes brought about by the new UI is also bearing fruit from an advertising and revenue viewpoint.

Our Take

Snapchat at one point of time was the app to use for stories. However, rapid development from Facebook-owned Instagram saw many Snapchat users leave the platform for good. The backlash that the redesigned app got did not help things either. Many analysts blamed the company’s CEO and founder Evan Spiegel for Snapchat’s downfall but it looks like it looks like the app will be making a recovery under his leadership only.

[Via Snap]

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