Snap has released its first-quarter financial results for 2022, and based on the report, its growth continues to outpace its US-based competitors, Facebook, now known as Meta and Twitter. Meta publicly disclosed it recorded its first decline in DAUs, while Twitter reported that there was a 2% increase in monetizable DAUs in the US and a 15% outside the US.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, added 18% more DAUs year over year, to 332 million. But for five consecutive quarters, it has added more than 20%. That matters less to Snap, though, because its revenue increased just 38% year over year, to $1.06 billion. The firm said that it was on track to see 44% growth since the previous Q1 2021 but noted that after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, many advertisers paused campaigns. "Most advertisers resumed their campaigns within 10 days," said Snap CFO Derek Andersen, but the disruption still had negative impacts on the company's quarterly revenue.

Impact of the war in Ukraine on input costs, marketing budgets and overall economic competence has been significant, and it's tough to predict its impact on a forward-looking basis, Andersen said on Snap's earnings call.

Snap also didn't receive enough revenue in Q3 2021, which it attributed to a significant change recently made by Apple to the iOS system's privacy. As Apple made it possible for iOS users to deny requests by apps for access to their off-app activities for purposes of advertising, most chose not to provide more information for the applications they use to the applications, which hurt the ad business of Snapchat and Facebook. The company noted that it is still trying to get over this curveball form from Apple in terms of revenue for its ads.

On the product side, Snap is going all-in on augmented reality experiences—so is Niantic!. The company said that 250 million Snapchatters engage with AR features every day, a pretty big chunk of its 332 million DAUs. This quarter, it introduced upgrades to AR shopping and community-generated AR experiences for local landmarks.

Next week, Snap will be attending its annual Snap Partner Summit and, as CEO Evan Spiegel said, it will host some new products and services on the said event.
Snap finally did it, y'all