Snap’s revenue woes continue but earnings yield a few bright spots

Snap just reported its quarterly earnings and it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Snapchat’s parent company brought in $1.07 billion during Q2 — up from last quarter but a year-over-year dip. Snap saw its first revenue decline as a public company in Q1, marking a 7% drop in sales from the previous year. At the time, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said that the shift did not reflect the company’s ambitions.

While revenue is trending down, Snapchat’s daily active users perked up in Q2, up 14% year-over-year to 397 million.

Like its peers, Snap is still contending with a decline in advertising revenue stemming from intense competition from rivals like TikTok and Instagram and changes to Apple’s app privacy policies that threw social media companies for a loop when first introduced.

To keep its platform fresh and its users engaged, Snapchat introduced buzzy new AI features in recent months, with some cordoned off specifically for its paid subscribers. Snap’s AI chatbot My AI is now woven into the app’s group chats, place recommendations and Lens suggestions.

A year ago, Snapchat introduced paid subscriptions, charging users $3.99 a month for a collection of premium perks. Snap’s premium service Snapchat+ — a hub for “exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features” — has now collected more than 4 million paid subscribers.

Paid memberships and premium tiers were once anathema to social media companies hellbent on squeezing every ad dollar out of their users, but that sentiment has shifted in recent years — particularly after Apple’s policy changes limited how closely platforms could track user behavior.