Maybe this is just what happens when Facebook mercilessly clones your most popular features in an all-out assault on your user growth. Snap Inc. issued its first earnings report since becoming a public company, and Wall Street was less than impressed. The Snapchat parent reported $149.65 million in revenue for Q1 of this year. That’s a hefty year-over-year increase over last year’s Q1 numbers ($38.8 million), but it was still less than the $158 million that analysts had projected. And the company saw a whopping net loss of $2.2 billion, though much of that was due to stock-based compensation. Operating expenses clocked in at $196 million. (Snap’s Q1 losses for 2016, by comparison, amounted to $104.58 million.)
But it wasn’t just the underwhelming revenue numbers and huge losses that scared investors; Snapchat’s user metrics were even more troubling. The app grew to 166 million users in Q1, an alarmingly small increase over the 161 million daily active users the company reported in December. The company’s shares took a nosedive in after-hours trading, plunging by over 20%. Yikes.