Snap founders won’t sell shares despite plummeting price

Snap has an awful Q2 earnings report… but at least its dancing AR hot dog was viewed 1.5 billion times. To prove their confidence, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy have agreed not to sell any shares this year, and the company will withhold shares they’re owed to pay for any necessary taxes. Of course, there are only five months left in the year, so this isn’t exactly a long-term lock-in.

One concrete metric announced was that Snap generated $5.4 million in “Other” revenue, which would equate to around 41,500 pairs of its Spectacles camera sunglasses at a $130 price point. That’s compared to $8.3 million in Q1 and $4.5 million in Q4.

Snap glossed over its shortcomings in user count and revenue to focus on several vanity metrics during its earnings call:

• The average user creates 20 Snaps per day.
• The dancing hot dog that Spiegel called the world’s “first augmented reality superstar” was viewed more than 1.5 billion times on Snapchat, plus tons more as it was made into viral memes shared around the web.
• Publisher Story views are up 30 percent quarter-over-quarter.
• Snap doubled the number of original “Shows” that premiered on its platform in Q2 versus Q1, with some getting more than 10 million views per episode.
• 250 million Snaps are saved to Memories each day.
• Since launching its Snap Map that shows what other people are doing around the world, submissions to Our Story have increased 30 percent.
• Snapchat users under age 25 spend more than 40 minutes per day on the app, while those over 25 spend more than 20 minutes a day on the app. That one-ups Instagram for teens, where under-25s spend more than 30 minutes per day, but falls short of Instagram’s older age group that uses it for 24 minutes per day.

For more details on Snap’s tough quarter, check out our full Q2 earnings coverage, including its new user count, and read our list of 8 ways to fix Snapchat.

Featured Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images