Operator: Our next question comes from Mark Shmulik with Bernstein. Please proceed.
Mark Shmulik: Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. A couple, if I may. The first just on Snap Stars. It sounds like it’s growing quite well and really contributing to engagement. Just wanted to kind of ask how do we think about the philosophy as we think about onboarding more Snap Stars, more spotlight more broadcast out media and how does that fit in the long-term engagement strategy kind of balancing it with like deepening connections with friends, family and people you care about? And then just the second question for Derek, we’ve heard from others just on the recovery of the digital ad market, certain verticals coming back kind of quicker than others. Any color you can share just about the vertical mix you’ve seen? Thanks.
Evan Spiegel: Thanks so much for the question. Yeah, as we look at content on Snapshot, I think the most successful is really about relationships. And those can be relationships with your close friends and family, but it could also be relationships with Snap Stars. And that’s the feedback we hear from Snapstars as well that the engagement they have the relationship they’re able to build with their audience on Snapchat is really unparalleled. And one of the reasons why they love investing in our platform. As we look at scaling the Snap Star program, I’d say today, the focus is mostly around looking at countries, geographies where we’re sort of under-indexed in investing in Snapstars there so we can build out more local language content.
We’re also looking at interest. A lot of Snapstars create content around their interests. That could be food or travel, sports, those sorts of things. And so we’re really looking at this intersection of the geographies where we have Snap Stars and on the interest as well and really lining up with that up with our community and what they’re looking for. So yes, I would say overall, to your point, relationships really do drive that content consumption on our service, and that’s why Snapstars are such an important part of our offering.
Derek Andersen: Sorry, in terms of color on the verticals and where we’re seeing the operating environment generally, as we went through Q1, number one, I think we’ve seen the improvement in the operating environment to be fairly broad into Q1 and that we did see certain regions particularly impacted by the war in the Middle East in Q4. And so that certainly we’ve seen demand, as we mentioned in the letter, really improve on that front quarter-over-quarter. But I think more broadly, we saw a much more robust brand environment, which played out in all of our regions in Q1. And then from a DR perspective, it’s really about fit. And of course, with purchase optimization and the scaled self-serve SMB product is working really well.
We’ve seen verticals such as CPG, e-commerce, restaurants and travel and SMBs broadly working really well. And I think what we’re excited about is to be able to broaden that out to a wider set of customers as we introduce more of these out-based optimizations and start to address other verticals. So a much better environment in Q1 for sure. Thank you for the question.
Operator: Our last question comes from Dan Salmon with New Street Research. Please proceed.
Dan Salmon: Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. Can you hear me, okay?
Evan Spiegel: Yes, we can. Thank you.
Dan Salmon: Okay. Good. Sorry about that. So two questions. Evan, I’m just curious, any early learnings from your ad partnership with Amazon and whether or not you’d consider more ad partners that can bring incremental demand both Amazon and Google or cloud partners after all could be interesting. And then second for Derek, can we just go back to the SMB advertiser growth at 85%. I mean that’s significant acceleration. Was there something like one-time in that? Or is that the type of level of growth you can expect throughout the year. Thank you.
Evan Spiegel: Thanks, Dan. Yes, as we look at Amazon partnership and what they’re doing with Handshake, I do think that’s a great learning opportunity for us. It’s still very early, but I think what’s exciting is being able to bring relevant products to Amazon shoppers inside the Snapchat experience. We know that people now shop where they consume content and so to be able to offer a relevant product selection in line and allow people to check out with 1 tap is certainly an exciting product development. So we’ll obviously continue to learn there and evolve that product. I do think just separately that some of these ad partnerships we’ve done and work we’ve done with other demand partners have been important elements of our growth, and we do see continued opportunity there.
Derek Andersen: Dan, on the question about SMB, I would agree. I mean, that growth on the active advertisers is obviously, a really important input to building what we hope will be a very big business for us over time. And we’re early in the going. So there’s a lot of opportunity set here both in terms of product market fit as we are able to have more optimizations that are going to appeal to a wider and wider audience in that SMB set. And I think we’re learning a lot about how to use integration partners to help make it easier for these advertisers to onboard over time as well as the ability to work our funnels, whether that’s from awareness to onboarding an acquisition to trial and discovery and through the scaling process of delivering raws for these partners.
So we’re early in the going there, but excited about the progress we’re seeing so far, and it’s something that we’ll hope to build on as we go forward. So thanks for the question. Hopefully, that gives you a little more perspective thinking about it.
Operator: This concludes our Q&A session as well as Snap Inc. first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Thank you all for attending today’s session. You may now disconnect.
