Snap shares tumbled, after an analyst for the investment banking and financial services firm Cowen said user engagement time was down.
In a note to clients, analyst John Blackledge said Cowen surveyed 2,500 users in the U.S. and found that Snap users spent an average of 33 minutes per day on the app during the second quarter. This number, according to the survey, is 7% less time than last year.
Blackledge also lowered his estimate of Snap daily users from 196 million to 194 million, according to Markets Insider, and in turn changed his second-quarter revenue forecast from $262 million to $248 million. The revenue number, CNBC notes, is “2% lower than the Wall Street consensus.”
“We trimmed our 2Q18, FY18-FY23 estimates, lowering our revenue / EBITDA forecast on slightly lower Daily Active Users (DAUs) and advertising ARPU,” Blackledge wrote in his note, according to CNBC. “Per our recent ad buyer survey, SNAP was lowest Social platform in key attributes like ROI, data and user targeting.”
Markets Insider, however, notes that Blackledge’s data stands at odds with an investor note from Deutsche Bank analyst Lloyd Walmsley, who earlier this month wrote, “Snap’s user growth looks robust in May.”
“We think it is plausible that the redesign of the redesign is getting traction across all geographies and ultimately has been helping sequential user growth in second-quarter 2018,” Walmsley continued.
Snap is the parent company of Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging app-turned-media platform. The company’s shares were down more than 7% on Tuesday afternoon.
