Snap Inc. (NYSE:SNAP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

It’s now our third consecutive year of adjusted EBITDA profitability, second consecutive year of positive free cash flow. And that’s important to controlling, our financial destiny going forward and making sure that we can fund the investments in the future of our business. And also making sure that we have the cash and cash flow to manage any dilution that we experience in the business. But you see, we’ve been active in doing. So hopefully, that gives you a sense of like, where we are on the reprioritization of the cost structure and funding our priorities, but also how we’re thinking about balancing that discipline going forward.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Lloyd Walmsley with UBS.

Lloyd Walmsley: Thanks. Two, if I can. First, you’ve talked a lot about the headwinds to time spent in friends’ stories, but can you just talk about what you’re seeing in the core chat experiences? Are you seeing growth in whether it’s time per user, visits per day per user in that core kind of anchor engagement that feeds the whole business? And then, the second one was just in the letter, you mentioned, discover content, moving into more places? Curious if you expect this to be more of a driver of engagement or monetization, or both? Have you started doing anything that you can kind of share early learnings with us here. Thanks.

Evan Spiegel: Thanks, Lloyd for the question. Yes, we’re incredibly excited about the momentum we’re seeing around our messaging service, visual messaging is really core to the Snapchat experience, and what helps people connect with their friends and family, and of course, enhances their relationships. So we’re really excited about that momentum there. And of course, the work that we’re doing in our camera, around augmented reality and helping our community express themselves with AR lenses and try and get new utility out of augmented reality with things like try on as well. So those core experiences around the camera and messaging are obviously really exciting driving a lot of growth for us. And also things like the map, for example, as we mentioned, I believe in the letter, Q4 Snapchatters open places on the map more than twice as often as they did in Q4 of 2021.

So, definitely a lot of strong growth engagement around the core product value of messaging and we’re really optimistic about some of the new products we have come in around that as well.

Operator: Thank you. Our last question comes from Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan.

Doug Anmuth: Thanks for taking the questions. I have two. First just to circle back on friends’ stories and the strategy there. It sounds like part of the goal here is to get people to shift into Spotlight more? Is the idea to shift them into that tab in particular or to put Spotlight videos within friends’ stories? And then can you also just talk about how revenue sharing with creators will work on Spotlight? Thanks.

Evan Spiegel: Yes, sure. So at a high level, what we’re seeing with friends’ stories is that people still really want to watch stories from their close friends and their family. It’s more the longer tail of their friends where they prefer to watch a really entertaining video than maybe a story about somebody’s day-to-day life. And so that’s really where we’re trying to understand where that sort of breakpoint is for different members of our community and help them discover Spotlight content sort of at that moment as they start to become less engaged with friends’ stories. So some of that, for example, is creating entry points even in Discover, right, so that people can tap directly into Spotlight content from that four-tab content experience.