Snapchat is the app for the teens—one of the finest in terms of innovations. The app has evolved over the years, and despite stalling in growth a couple of times in the past, Snapchat remains the favorite of millions of people out there. On Thursday Snap announced that it has hit an important milestone—the app now has 500 million monthly active userbase—that is some achievement.
Before now, Snap had never released its monthly active user base—the company had instead often made public its daily user base. During this year’s Snap Partner Summit, the ephemeral image sharing app shared a slew of new AR features that could help to push its monetization plans.
Some of the features announced on Thursday by Snap include:
Public Profiles for Businesses
This new feature allows brands to showcase their products and artificial reality lenses. These profiles others include Shop pages that allows you to browse brands’ catalogs and buy goods directly from the Snapchat app.
Wrist Tracking
The company also announced a wrist tracking technology that allows you to use AR lenses to try on jewelry and watches.
Screenshop
This feature allows you to use the Snapchat camera to scan a friend’s outfit and shop for similar products recommended by the app.
Connected Lenses
This feature allows friends in distant places to interact with the same virtual lenses. To get started, a company will have a lens that allows users to build a Lego kit together.
Snapchat and many other social media platforms are daily pushing out new features and technology to encourage shopping. Instagram, which by far is Snapchat’s biggest competitor has remained consistent in terms of encourage the use of its platform for shopping.
Speaking at its third annual at the summit which had in attendance hundreds of thousands of developers, Snap also announced some impressive stats and figures. From the figures reeled out, the company seems to be doing fine.
Per Axios, here are some important figures you might want to take note of:
- 200 million people now use Bitmoji stickers every day.
- 1 billion Bitmojis are sent.
- About 30 million Snapchat users play games on the app every month.
- More than 250 million people use Snapchat’s “Snap Map” every month.
- Nearly 2 million AR lenses have been created by Snapchat users using Snapchat’s developer tools.
