A few months ago, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said the key to raising his company’s stock was beefing up marketing budgets while also beefing up the number of Snapchatters on the platform. And it appears the company was able to pull both things off, according to its third-quarter earnings report released today.
Snapchat ended the third quarter with 210 million daily active users, up from 203 million the previous quarter, according to the results, which also revealed that the average amount earned for each of those users—the ARPU—jumped from $1.91 to $2.12 for the quarter. In North America alone, that number went from $3.14 to $3.75.
On the whole, Snap beat investors’ expectations for the quarter, earning $446 million, a 50% year-over-year increase from its roughly $298 million third-quarter earnings in 2018.
“We delivered strong results this quarter, and we are pleased that the investments we have made are continuing to drive the growth of our community and our business,” Spiegel said in a statement. “We are a high growth business, with strong operating leverage, a clear path to profitability, a distinct vision for the future, and the ability to invest over the long term. We are excited about executing on the many opportunities in front of us.”
The company pointed to recent forays into augmented reality and experimentation on its native Discover platform as driving some of the growth. Time spent on Discover alone increased by 40% year over year, per Snapchat. Meanwhile, the third quarter saw more than 100 channels on the Discover platform reach more than 10 million collective sets of eyeballs.
The company also became smarter about monetizing those views. This year, it has started testing made-for-mobile dynamic ads that respond to real-time metrics from a particular brand and extended the maximum duration ads can be played on the platform “to enable advertisers to tell more detailed brand stories.”