Photo Credit: Lars Crommelinck / CC by 2.0
Snapchat drops a new augmented reality lens featuring Billie Eilish, giving fans a first listen to her latest music.
It’s quarterly financials season, and Snapchat parent Snap has had a good quarter, with revenue growth of 21% year-on-year to $1.19 billion, while its daily active users climbed by 10% to 422 million. As always, Snapchat’s augmented reality lenses were a big draw for its user base, and now the platform is offering a new one with a pretty impressive get — an exclusive first listen to Billie Eilish’s upcoming album.
Snapchat’s latest AR lens gives fans a sneak peek at “L’Amour De Ma Vie,” the latest track from Eilish’s upcoming album, and encourages fans to use the lens to create reaction clips to the song. With over 300 million users engaging with Snapchat’s AR functions daily, that should see the track getting significant reach ahead of its official release.
Unsurprisingly, Snap plans to continue to invest in generative AI models for the creation of more AR lenses on the platform. The company says the number of lenses viewed by users has increased by over 50% year-over-year.
But it’s not only Snapchat’s AR lenses that have seen to its continued growth. Like many of its peers, Snapchat’s answer to TikTok, its Spotlight feed, saw some impressive upward trajectory too, with use increasing by over 125% year-on-year. Likewise, the number of users paying for the Snapchat+ subscription tier has more than tripled to nine million.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel admits that the continued success of its short-form video feed is aided in no small part by the recently passed bill that would ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, fails to divest to an American company within the year. But he also says that Snap has invested in “more advanced” ranking models in the past year, which are significantly driving improvements in content engagement.
“I think there’s work to be done to make our content experience feel more timely and topical, and then we’re spending a lot of focus on the creator journey overall,” said Spiegel. “That journey from using Snapchat to communicate with 100 friends to growing a following of millions. And really making sure that people are creating great stories, or great Spotlight content can be discovered, and then grow that following and ultimately build a business over time.”
The company laid off 10% of its workforce in February, but now says it expects headcount to “grow modestly” throughout the year.
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