ETtech Exclusive: Snap India doubled user base, engagement in 2022: CEO Evan Spiegel

The sharp uptick in Snap’s Indian business comes amid the broader turmoil roiling technology firms globally. The app’s monthly active users in India, which was estimated at about 100 million in October 2021, has since doubled.

The Los Angeles-headquartered company, which competes with Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp, among others, is now looking at India as a priority market.

“We are really excited about what we’re seeing in India and the growth of our community there,” Spiegel said in a virtual interaction with ET. Founded in 2011, Snapchat had primarily focused on iPhone users in its home market, but in the last few years it has made efforts to localise its offerings outside of the US.

“Our community in India, both in terms of daily and monthly active users, has more than doubled,” he said, pointing also to greater engagement by Indian users with specific products such as Spotlight, which directly competes with Instagram Reels, and its augmented reality application Lenses.

Snap now aims to invest more in India across these new businesses. Snap’s Spotlight also competes with YouTube’s Shorts, while another global rival TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, is banned in India. Spotlight saw time spent on the platform by Indian users shoot up 175% in 2022 compared to 2021.

Discover the stories of your interest

ETtech

“Our primary focus is just continuing to grow engagement there.. we believe this will lead to advertising opportunities.. we have also been more widely testing Spotlight advertising,” Spiegel said.

In January, Ajit Mohan, formerly the vice president and managing director of Meta India, joined Snap to lead its businesses across India as well as in Southeast Asia, China, Australia, and New Zealand.

Mohan’s ascension to the post followed the exit of Snap’s former India head Durgesh Kaushik in 2022.

Also read | Why Snap is wooing Bharat

Global headwinds

Globally, the past year has been challenging for the social media firm as the digital advertising market plunged on the back of macroeconomic and geopolitical concerns around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising interest rates in the US.

Snap laid off 20% or about 1,300 of its employees in 2022, according to US media reports, like most tech majors including Meta, Google, and Amazon.

For the full year 2022, Snap’s sales rose 12% to $4.6 billion in 2022. In its investor letter, the company said its “internal forecast” assumes a decline between 2% and 10% from a year earlier. Analysts were expecting a slight increase in revenue, a CNBC report said. Spiegel told ET that monetisation and shoring up advertising revenue will now be at the centre of the firm’s strategy.

ETtech

It is also working on new products like its subscription product Snapchat+. “We are focused on reaccelerating our revenue growth. We have brought in regional presidents who report to our new chief operating officer Jerry Hunter,” Spiegel said.

The company has also rolled out several changes to the advertising platform as it competes with large companies such as Spotify and Netflix, which are also doubling down on their advertising divisions as subscriber growth slows down.

However, Snap is yet to emerge as a go-to platform for content creators and for brands to advertise with. ET reported in November 2022 that lack of data insights on Snapchat was proving to be its Achilles’ heel. More so, at a time when brands are demanding higher accountability and conversion metrics before allocating marketing spends to a platform.

Pointing to the company’s focus on ‘direct revenue share to creators’, Spiegel said this helps the creator community express itself and share its day-to-day lives without having to force some sort of brand integration.

“And then we share the revenue by inserting ads in that story, right in between their snaps,” he added.

At Snap’s partner summit on Wednesday, the company announced new initiatives in artificial intelligence, for creators, and augmented reality. It will roll out its AI-powered chatbot after initial testing as a Snapchat+ subscriber product; and is opening Stories revenue share programme to more creators.

On the ongoing debate about regulating generative AI language models such as ChatGPT, Spiegel said the discussion on AI’s development and its impact on humanity was testament to what people have learned over the last 20 years developing technology products.

“I believe what we need to be more focused on today is helping people learn how to use the products in a healthy, safe, and productive way,” he said.