The start in India in the middle of the corona pandemic brought millions of new users to the messaging service Snapchat. Snapchat has cracked the mark of 500 million users per month, the company announced on Thursday. In India, the number of users has increased by 100 percent year-on-year in the past five quarters – that is, since the beginning of the pandemic.
Around 40 percent of the users now have Snapchat outside of North America and Europe, as company boss Evan Spiegel explained. In the traditional regions, however, the app is still very popular, especially with young people: In the USA, France, Great Britain, Australia and the Netherlands, 90 percent of 13- to 24-year-olds have Snapchat on their smartphones; Up to 34-year-olds it is 75 percent, as Spiegel said.
Snapchat is especially popular because of its filters and augmented reality functions – users can, for example, try on clothes or try out makeup virtually. However, the messaging service is still a long way from competitor Facebook with its four networks Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp with a total of around 3.45 billion users per month. The video service Tiktok, although launched later, already has more users than Snapchat, namely around 690 million worldwide.
Snapchat, which went public in 2017, is not yet profitable. In the first quarter of 2021, the company made a loss of $ 286 million. Revenue rose 66 percent year over year to $ 770 million.
ilo / noe
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