Social media companies Twitter and Snapchat have had a strong second quarter. Twitter achieved almost three quarters more turnover than a year earlier; Snapchat even saw its turnover double. Both services managed to attract more users and also made more money from advertisers.
According to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the messaging service has done a lot of work in recent years to create new opportunities for companies to advertise. Previously, Twitter was mainly dependent on large brands that want to maintain their brand awareness with their advertisements. But now, the company has developed more features to directly entice people to engage with ads through the platform, making it more attractive to small and medium-sized businesses like Facebook.
It earned the San Francisco-based tech company quarterly revenue of nearly $1.2 billion, up 74 percent from the same period last year. This sharp increase does give a somewhat distorted picture because, in the spring of 2020, companies massively suspended their advertising expenditure due to uncertainty about the pandemic. The number of daily active users rose 11 percent year-on-year to 206 million.
Twitter also saw costs rise, partly because the company has to attract a lot of technologically skilled talent to develop new functions. Still, the company managed to make a net profit of 66 million dollars.
Snapchat’s revenue rose to $982.1 million in the three months to June, increasing 116 percent from a year earlier. During the same period, some 293 million people used the app every day, known for photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. That is an increase of 23 percent year on year. Snap also managed to limit its net loss to $152 million, up from $326 million in the second quarter of 2020.
Both the growth in user numbers and revenue had not been as strong in the past four years as in the past quarter, CEO Evan Spiegel reports. Several new features for Snapchat, which is especially popular among young people, helped with that. For example, it has recently been possible to record short videos via this app that can then go ‘viral’, just like with the popular TikTok.
The company also develops all kinds of novelties for advertisers. For example, users can swipe past brands on their smartphone and use virtual reality to see how a watch or glasses of a particular brand would look.
