Snap Inc's latest earnings report marked a first for social media company: a decline of three million daily active users in the second quarter of 2018, from 191 million down to 188 million DAUs.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel chalked up the drop to the negative reaction to its major user interface redesign, but that's not the only factor slowing Snapchat's growth; it has fallen far behind other social-media platforms. Statista broke down Snapchat's daily-active-user numbers and found that the app's decrease in use was consistent across North Amerca and European markets as well as the rest of the world.
It's not all bad news. Snap still beat Wall Street analyst expectations for Q2 revenue and continues to shrink its quarterly loss as it figures out how to monetize. The problem is that its growth prospects don't look promising when stacked against the competition.
Despite Facebook's ongoing privacy scandals and public scrutiny, its trio of messaging and social apps still dominate the market. Instagram, Facebook (including Messenger), and WhatsApp have each grown by hundreds of thousands of monthly active users from Q2 2017 to Q2 2018. Instagram tops the charts at 300 million users added, followed by Facebook at 228 million and WhatsApp at 200 million.
By comparison, Snapchat added only 15 million daily users over the past year. Twitter grew by an even smaller amount, adding only 9 million monthly active users over that span. Twitter's growth has stalled since hitting 302 million monthly active users in Q1 2015, having added only 33 million total users in the three years since.
By the numbers, Snapchat looks a lot more like Twitter than it does Facebook or Instagram.