Analyst Rich Greenfield: Snap Needs More Than Users to Survive
*By Conor White*
Snap's mixed bag on earnings points to a murky future for the Snapchat app, which may hold more promise as a messaging platform than the ad-supported content powerhouse many people expected it to be, said BTIG's media and tech analyst, Rich Greenfield.
"I think the challenge is more and more time spent feels like it's shifting to communications and away from content," Greenfield said Wednesday in an interview with Cheddar. "So their core use case is very sticky for the entire generation that uses it as their iMessage, essentially."
Optimistic investors may be heartened by Snap's revenue beat in the second quarter, but Greenfield said numbers from the company's earnings report on Tuesday are nothing to celebrate.
"I've never cut my target for a company in terms of revenues by 50 percent over a 14-month period," Greenfield said. "We thought when this company went public they would do $2.5 billion in revenue this year, they're struggling to get to the $1.1, $1.2 \[billion\] revenue this year. "
The analyst said it isn't enough to have millions of people using Snapchat as a messaging platform, since "filters don't make billions of dollars," he said.
Content is still key to Snap's future as a business, Greenfield said.
"They've got to convince people, to make this a multi-billion dollar business, they need people to spend a lot of time on the right side of the app, consuming content."
For more on this story, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/snap-loses-daily-active-users-for-first-time-ever).
Snapchat has launched its first features to help users learn American Sign Language through its lenses and a game. The project was spearheaded by deaf and hard-of-hearing workers. Cheddar News was joined by Austin Vaday, software engineer at Snap, and his sign language interpreter, Jonathan Webb, to discuss the ASL Fingerspelling Lens and how the project came together. “We wanted to find a way to appropriately and properly educate the community so that folks can communicate with people like me using sign language," Vaday stated.
Brittan Heller, founder of the Center for Digital Civil Rights and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, joins Cheddar News to discuss the rise of sexual assault in the metaverse.
The second-largest stablecoin, USDC, backed by the company Circle recently received a $400 million funding infusion from traditional financial firms like BlackRock and Fidelity even as crypto reels from more high profile heists.
A group of Tesla shareholders suing CEO Elon Musk over some 2018 tweets about taking the company private is asking a federal judge to order Musk to stop commenting on the case.
The Week's Top Stories is a guided tour through the biggest market stories of the week, from winning stocks to brutal dips to the facts and forecasts generating buzz on Wall Street.
Between Bells executive producer Conor White recaps some of the biggest stories of the week, and teaches Azia Celestino and Hena Doba a thing or two at the same time. It's This Week In Trivia!
Josh Thorngren, vice president of growth at the cybersecurity company Torq, joined Cheddar News to talk about staffing shortages hitting his industry, and what he thinks is behind it. "Over 70 percent of cybersecurity professionals say they're unhealthily stressed, and it's stress because we only talk about them when they failed," he said. "That makes the job harder day in and day out, and so it's not just a how do we keep up with the rising challenge, it's how do we actually retain folks who are in these positions today." Thorngren also stated that cybersecurity needs to transform into a less technical field in order to appeal to a bigger group of potential workers.
Twitter said in a statement Friday that its board of directors has unanimously adopted a “poison pill” defense in response to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s proposal to buy the company and take it private.
