Snapchat’s anime filter was used more than 3 billion times in the first week after it was released, Snap said today, confirming what we already knew: it was a huge hit.
The filter, which morphs its subject into an anime character, is just the latest in a line of fun AR lenses from Snapchat that have gone viral and helped drive usage on the platform. During its third quarter, Snapchat had 249 million daily users, up from 238 million last quarter. The company’s revenue was also up to $679 million, a 52 percent increase even as the pandemic chilled ad spending elsewhere.
There are signs that Snap’s growth is more robust than drive-by filter users. The average number of Snaps created each day is up 25 percent year over year, the company said (though it didn’t say exactly how many that is). Time spent watching shows on Snapchat also grew by 50 percent.
Snap called out the success of its AR features, in particular, when highlighting where it saw growth in the longer term. “The adoption of augmented reality is happening faster than we had previously anticipated, and we are working together as a team to execute on the many opportunities in front of us,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in remarks alongside the company’s earnings release for the third quarter of 2020.
Though Snapchat tends to get less attention than other social networks, it’s among the bigger apps out there. Twitter reported having 186 million daily users last quarter, and TikTok reported in August that it had 100 million daily users in the US. (Snapchat has 90 million daily users in all of North America.) It’s still tiny compared to Facebook and its suite of apps, though. Instagram had 500 million daily users when it last provided an updated number in 2018.