Photo credit: Lars Crommelinck / CC by 2.0
Snapchat is launching a new augmented reality lens featuring Billie Eilish, giving fans a first listen to her latest music.
It’s quarterly financial results season and Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, had a strong quarter, with revenue growth of 21% year-over-year to $1.19 billion, while its daily active users have climbed 10% to 422 million. As always, Snapchat’s augmented reality lenses have been a big draw to its user base, and now the platform is offering a new one with a pretty impressive result: an exclusive first listen to Billie Eilish’s next album.
Snapchat’s latest AR lens gives fans a glimpse of “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 using Snapchat’s AR features daily, this should allow the title to achieve significant reach ahead of its official release.
Unsurprisingly, Snap plans to continue investing in generative AI models to create more AR lenses on the platform. The company says the number of lenses viewed by users has increased by more than 50% year over year.
But it’s not just Snapchat’s AR lenses that have contributed to its continued growth. Like many of its peers, Snapchat’s answer to TikTok, its Spotlight feed, has also seen an impressive upward trajectory, with usage increasing more than 125% year over year. Likewise, the number of users paying for the Snapchat+ subscription tier more than tripled to nine million.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel admits that the continued success of its short-form video stream is aided in large 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. during this year. But he also says Snap has invested in “more advanced” ranking models over the past year that significantly improve content engagement.
“I think there’s work to be done to make our content experience more current and current, and then we focus a lot on the creator journey as a whole,” Spiegel said. “This journey from using Snapchat to connect with 100 friends to growing millions of followers. And really making sure that people are creating great stories or quality Spotlight content can be discovered and then growing that audience and ultimately building a business over time.
The company laid off 10% of its workforce in February, but now says it expects “modest growth” in its workforce throughout the year.
