Snap Inc. said on November 4, 2026 that its advertising revenue rose 4% in the third quarter, to $1.37 billion, while revenue from subscriptions and other sources climbed 84% to $349.7 million. That split meant subscriptions accounted for about 74% of the company's $215.6 million year-over-year revenue increase, according to PPC Land's calculation from Snap's quarterly report on Form 10-Q. Total revenue for the three months to September 30 reached $1.72 billion, up 14%, and the company posted net income of $56.5 million against a loss of $103.5 million a year earlier.

The same set of documents carried a change that will alter how the market follows Snapchat. From its first-quarter 2027 results, Snap will replace daily active users with monthly users as its main audience figure and stop publishing daily user counts and average revenue per user for North America, Europe and the rest of the world. North American daily users stood at 92 million in the quarter, down 6% from 98 million a year earlier.

In Short

Snapchat made more money between July and September than a year before, but most of the extra money came from people paying for extras like Snapchat+, not from companies buying ads. Ad sales grew only 4%, because big brands spent less while advertisers chasing direct sales and app downloads spent more. Starting in 2027, Snap will also stop saying how many people open the app each day in North America and Europe, so outsiders will have fewer numbers to judge how its most valuable regions are doing.

Advertising slows as subscriptions carry the quarter

The revenue table in the 10-Q tells most of the story. Advertising revenue was $1,372.8 million, up from $1,317.1 million, an increase of $55.7 million or 4.2%. Other revenue, which the filing says "primarily consists of revenue from subscriptions, which include Snapchat+, Lens+, and Snapchat Platinum," along with Memories Storage plans and partnership fees, rose to $349.7 million from $189.7 million. The $160.0 million increase, according to Snap, "is due to higher subscription revenue from growth in the number of subscribers and the introduction of new subscription products."

Advertising's share of Snap's revenue has been shrinking quickly. For the full years 2025, 2024 and 2023, advertising accounted for approximately 87%, 91% and 96% of total revenue, according to the risk factors in the filing. In the third quarter of 2026 it was 79.7%, PPC Land calculates, down from 87.4% in the same quarter of 2025. Over nine months, advertising revenue grew 5.3% while other revenue grew 85.3%.

The quarter reversed the second-quarter improvement on the advertising side. Snap's ad revenue grew 3% in the first quarter, when total revenue reached $1.53 billion, then accelerated to 9% in the second quarter, when advertising revenue reached $1,282.5 million and other revenue jumped 85%. In the third quarter, growth fell back to 4%.

Evan Spiegel, co-founder and chief executive, did not dress the figure up. "Certainly 4% ad growth is below our ambitions," he said on the earnings call, in reply to Doug Anmuth of JPMorgan, who recalled that Spiegel's annual letter had set out an ambition to move ad growth toward the mid-teens. Spiegel added that he was "cautiously optimistic about the progress we're seeing here in Q4," saying Snap was "seeing a bit of acceleration on the ad side." The prepared remarks put it in similar terms: "While advertising revenue growth remains below our ambitions, advertisers are seeing the benefits of our performance improvements."

Subscriptions, by contrast, keep compounding. Snap said it "surpassed 30 million paid subscribers across Snapchat+, Memories Storage, and Lens+." In July, Snap had disclosed more than 25 million subscribers across its subscription business. Lens+, which Snapchat introduced in June 2025 as a premium Lens subscription tier, was singled out by Spiegel: "Innovative AI-powered features have helped Lens+ exceed our expectations, demonstrating how new creative experiences can drive demand for our paid products." Subscription revenue is initially deferred and then recognized over the subscription term, and deferred revenue stood at $246.6 million on September 30, against $145.2 million at the end of 2025, according to the filing.

Subscriptions are not free to run. Advertising partner and other costs rose $33.1 million in the quarter, which the 10-Q attributes to "higher transaction processing fees due to growth in subscription revenue." Snap reports subscription revenue gross of those fees and books the fees as cost of revenue.

Brand budgets retreat while direct response holds

Ronan Harris, the chief commercial officer, said the drag came from the top of the funnel. "In Q3, direct response advertising grew strongly, supported by improved purchase outcomes. However, upper funnel brand advertising declined year-over-year, weighing on our overall growth," he said in the prepared remarks.

Asked by Ross Sandler of Barclays what had happened, Harris was specific. "To talk about brand, it declined mainly because of lower CPG spending driven by macro pressures in the US and also the Middle East. Q2 also benefited, I think, from easier comparisons and World Cup-related spending," he said, adding that this was part of the sequential deceleration. He pointed to "very positive signs of growth from diversified verticals like financial services in the US" and said work on inventory and formats gave Snap confidence "that we're going to start to see the brand business regain ground over the course of 2027."

Direct response, advertising bought to produce a measurable action such as a purchase or an install, now dominates the mix. "Direct response is up to about 77% of our revenues at this stage. So that's a substantial increase versus last year," Harris said in reply to Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners, who had asked how large the brand business still is. Harris did not give a figure for brand revenue itself, and Snap did not say whether the 77% share refers to total revenue or advertising revenue alone.

The 10-Q adds a less upbeat frame. "In addition, competition for advertising dollars has increased and demand growth on our advertising platform has slowed," the filing states. "Demand has also been disrupted by recent changes we made to our advertising platform, and, in the future, we may continue to experience adverse impacts to our revenue growth as a result of these changes." The filing also repeats that revenue, "particularly in North America," has been affected by platform policy changes that limited targeting, measurement and optimization.

The performance numbers Snap gave advertisers

Snap leaned on campaign metrics to argue that direct response is improving. The figures are Snap's own, and the quarterly materials do not publish the methodology.

For campaigns optimized for app purchases, purchase volume "more than doubled year-over-year, while average cost per purchase declined approximately 24% and revenue grew over 54%," according to the prepared remarks. For web purchase campaigns, purchases rose more than 31%, average cost per purchase fell 15% and revenue grew 11%.

The company cited one named advertiser case. Skincare brand DRMTLGY used the measurement firm WorkMagic to assess Snapchat's incremental effect on sales, according to Snap. The brand scaled its Snapchat investment 6.2 times while improving its incremental return on ad spend by 45%, "driving 9x incremental revenue," Harris said. "New customers accounted for 73% of incremental orders, up from 54%." Incrementality is also the core of Snap's Spend Smarter campaign for media planners, launched September 30, which cited a Measured figure of about 19.3% higher incremental ROAS than blended social.

Machine learning work on the shopping side was described in two product names. Dynamic Product Ads Generative Retrieval and Agentic Recommendations, according to Harris, "help connect products in an advertiser's catalog with a Snapchatter's interests and activity to identify products they may value." Together with improvements that recognize multiple interests per user, Snap said these "have already contributed to an over 2.5% increase in Pixel Purchase conversions."

Commerce Power Pack

Ahead of the holiday season, Snap introduced the Commerce Power Pack, a bundle it says is meant "to help advertisers turn discovery into purchases and optimize for business value." It has two named parts. Dynamic Product Ads for Sponsored Snaps "brings personalized catalog ads into Chat and is available globally," according to the prepared remarks. Third-Party Web Optimization, in open beta, "combines Snap's signals with third-party measurement signals to optimize toward advertisers' preferred sources of measurement."

The single example offered was Foot Locker in France, which "recorded a 53% higher return on ad spend and a 38% lower cost per acquisition, measured through its third-party measurement platform," after switching its Snapchat campaigns to the new optimization, according to Snap. The company did not name the measurement platform or the comparison period.

Measurement for app advertisers

For app marketers, Snap said Unified Attribution "became generally available across AppsFlyer and Adjust in August, extending support to measurement partners representing over 75% of app advertising revenue." The feature aligns campaign optimization with purchase outcomes reported by advertisers' mobile measurement partners. PPC Land covered the move out of beta to all markets on August 31, when Snap reported a 26% lower cost per acquisition for one unnamed advertiser in testing.

Harris tied measurement directly to budget size. "So I think if it's easy to buy, they're getting great results that they can rely on, then they're happily going to scale and we're going to be able to increase our share of wallet," he said in reply to Dan Salmon of New Street Research, adding that smaller advertisers "are typically resource and time constrained."

Chat, Spotlight and the Map

Snap's third stated priority is expanding where ads run, and it reported each surface's growth on a different basis.

Sponsored Snaps, the ad format delivered into the Chat inbox, grew revenue 56% sequentially, "with Chat's share of total revenue increasing approximately 8 percentage points year-over-year," according to Harris. Snap launched an auction-based version of Sponsored Snaps in Europe during the quarter. The format and its Snap Map counterpart were first announced in October 2024, with Disney as the Sponsored Snaps launch partner and McDonald's and Taco Bell among the first Promoted Places brands.

The 10-Q adds a qualification the call did not. The increase in advertising revenue "is primarily due to higher advertiser spending across native surfaces such as Sponsored Snaps and Promoted Places, reflecting in part a shift in advertiser spending from other advertising surfaces." Some of the growth in Chat, in other words, came out of other Snapchat placements rather than from new budgets, though the filing does not quantify how much.

Spotlight, Snap's short-form video feed, posted the strongest engagement figures. The number of people posting to Spotlight grew 130% year over year and daily active viewers rose 40%, according to Spiegel. Average Spotlight eCPM, the revenue earned per thousand impressions, increased 22%. Spiegel attributed the growth in creators partly to content policy. "Earlier this year, we really worked hard to remove AI-generated content or reposted content from the service and really focused on our community and the things that they were creating," he said in reply to Justin Post of Bank of America. That follows Snap's decision to stop recommending wholly AI-generated videos on Spotlight from July 2026.

Promoted Places, the paid placement on Snap Map, more than doubled both revenue and advertiser adoption sequentially, and Snap expanded the product to 14 countries. Snap did not give a revenue base. In July, Snap said Snap Map had more than 450 million monthly users. Harris described the opportunity as "spanning restaurants, retailers, and other local businesses."

Less money for creators and publishers

One line in the cost table has direct consequences for media owners on Snapchat. Content and developer partner costs, which the 10-Q defines as "fees paid to our content creators and publisher partners who share content on our platform through revenue sharing arrangements," fell to $89.8 million in the quarter from $154.2 million a year earlier. That is a 41.8% decline, according to PPC Land's calculation.

Snap explained the drop as a product shift. The $64.5 million reduction came "as we shift to higher-margin advertising products such as Sponsored Snaps and Promoted Places," according to the filing. Under the revenue-share model, Snap pays partners a portion of the fees it receives for Snap Ads shown inside their content. Neither Sponsored Snaps, which sit in the Chat inbox, nor Promoted Places, which sit on the map, runs inside partner content.

The decline was the main reason cost of revenue fell $24.8 million in the quarter, according to the filing. Spiegel said Snap continues "to invest in creators and AI-powered recommendations," yet the revenue-share pool for partner content shrank by more than two fifths in a year.

Margins, costs and cash

Total costs and expenses were $1,645.8 million, against $1,635.2 million a year earlier, a rise of 0.6%. Doug Hott, the chief financial officer, said "our total cost structure grew just 1% year-over-year," and that "approximately 93% of incremental revenue" flowed through to adjusted EBITDA. Snap defines that operating leverage figure as the change in adjusted EBITDA divided by the change in revenue; PPC Land's check of the reported numbers gives 93.0%.

Gross margin reached 62%, up from 55%, on both GAAP and adjusted bases, according to the earnings slides. Operating income was $76.7 million, a 4% margin, against an operating loss of $128.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $382.6 million from $182.0 million, a 22% margin. Net income of $56.5 million, or $0.03 per diluted share, was Snap's second profitable quarter in the six disclosed in its supplemental tables, after $45.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Hott warned against extrapolating the flow-through. "One thing to call out, the 93% flow-through is a measure of this quarter's year-over-year operating leverage. So the revenue mix, seasonality, timing of expenses, and investment levels affect that outcome," he said. Snap's objective, he added, is "to translate that earnings progress into sustained free cash flow per share rather than really optimize a single quarter's margin."

By function, research and development rose 5% to $477.7 million and sales and marketing rose 16% to $298.0 million, the latter "primarily driven by higher advertising and marketing event costs," according to the filing. General and administrative expenses fell 12% to $220.6 million on reduced headcount. Stock-based compensation was $254.8 million, about 14.8% of revenue by PPC Land's calculation.

Headcount fell sharply. Snap had 4,540 full-time employees at the end of September, down 13% from 5,194 a year earlier and down from 5,381 at the end of March. In the second quarter Snap announced a plan to reduce global headcount by approximately 16% of full-time employees, part of the April 2026 restructuring that Snap expected to cut annualized costs by more than $500 million in the second half. Restructuring charges for the nine months totaled $128.5 million: $75.3 million in severance, $26.1 million in stock-based compensation and $27.1 million mostly for lease exits.

AI featured in the efficiency argument. In the third quarter, according to Spiegel, Snap's engineering teams "more than doubled the number of merged pull requests year-over-year, while the defect rate per merged pull request declined over 71%." For advertisers, "AI search now resolves over 92% of help-center sessions, while support cases declined 35% year-over-year." Earlier in the year Snap also added an MCP server for third-party AI agents.

Infrastructure spending stayed almost flat. Infrastructure costs, mainly payments to Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services for hosting, were $411.5 million, 1.8% higher than a year earlier while monthly users grew 4%. Hott narrowed full-year infrastructure guidance to $1.65 billion to $1.66 billion, from $1.65 billion to $1.70 billion, "as we have been able to increase our investments in AI and ML without increasing our overall infrastructure costs."

Cash generation improved. Operating cash flow rose 44% to $210.5 million and free cash flow rose 76% to $164.5 million. Over the trailing twelve months, operating cash flow was $983 million and free cash flow $777 million. Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were about $2.77 billion, up roughly $111 million from the end of June. Notes outstanding totaled $3.4 billion, maturing between 2027 and 2034.

From daily users to monthly users

The metric change is set out in identical language across the press release, the earnings slides and the 10-Q. "Beginning with our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q to be filed for the first quarter of 2027, we plan to transition to global MAU as our primary audience metric. This change will include the replacement of global DAU with global MAU, as well as the discontinuation of regional DAU and regional ARPU," the release states. Alongside global MAU, Snap will introduce a global ARPU calculated on monthly active users rather than daily users. Regional revenue for North America, Europe and the rest of the world will continue to be reported.

The definition of MAU will change too. From the first quarter of 2027, MAU will include any registered and logged-in user who visits "at least one Snapchat-branded product," which brings in users accessing Snap's products through Apple Watch. It will also be measured on activity during the last 30 days of the quarter, so reported MAU "will represent the number of active users as of quarter end rather than an average of monthly active users during the quarter." Snap said the revised method would have changed third-quarter 2026 MAU by less than 1%, with similarly immaterial effects for every quarter from the first quarter of 2024.

Snap's stated reasoning is about product incentives. "While DAU remains an important measure of engagement, we no longer believe it is the best primary measure of long-term value," the company said. "Daily engagement has historically been stable as a percentage of monthly engagement, but we do not intend to optimize Snapchat around daily use at the expense of long-term value for our community." The ratio does look stable: global DAU divided by global MAU was between 50.1% and 50.8% in each of the six quarters in Snap's supplemental table, PPC Land calculates.

Asked by Eric Sheridan of Goldman Sachs to explain the shift, Hott linked it to a strategy set in 2025. "We reduced our investment in community growth marketing globally, put less emphasis on growing daily active users, and focused on building our direct revenue business. The changes here to our reporting reflect that strategy," he said. "But some decisions that improve the experience on Snap, keep people safe, or support long-term retention may actually affect daily active use in the near term."

Spiegel gave examples when Greenfield asked what Snap would choose not to do. "One might be the choice to engage in user acquisition or costly user engagement in a geography that we don't currently monetize or don't effectively monetize. Another example might be deciding not to send certain notifications or to add new features to Snapchat that might generate another app open, but don't ultimately lead to long-term value," he said. "So it certainly doesn't mean we're trying to reduce time spent or accept lower ad revenue."

What the regional figures show

The regional daily user series that Snap will stop publishing has been moving in one direction in its most valuable markets. North American DAU was 92 million in the third quarter, down 6% year over year. According to the year-over-year growth figures printed in the 10-Q's charts, North America has now recorded eight consecutive quarters of year-over-year declines, from minus 1% in the fourth quarter of 2024 to minus 7% in the first two quarters of 2026 and minus 6% in the third. PPC Land reported the North American figure at 94 million in Snap's fourth-quarter 2025 results. European DAU was 98 million, down 1%, a fourth consecutive quarterly decline. Rest of World DAU grew 9% to 305 million.

Monetization in those regions moved the other way. North American ARPU rose 20% to $11.07 and European ARPU rose 23% to $3.69, against $1.13 for the rest of the world, up 2%. Global ARPU was $3.48, up 10%. On the planned MAU basis, using the current average MAU of 977 million, third-quarter ARPU would be about $1.76, PPC Land calculates.

The gap between engagement and daily users came up on the call. Justin Post asked why stronger Spotlight and Chat metrics did not appear to be "translating to US and Europe DAU," and whether "that increasing engagement would show up in monthly, but maybe not daily." Spiegel's answer addressed Spotlight's content strategy and Harris's addressed ad formats. Neither addressed the daily user trend directly.

Snap's own risk factors set out the costs of the change. "If we modify or discontinue regional user metrics, analysts may also rely on third-party or other indirect estimates that may not be comparable to our reported metrics, which could make it more difficult to evaluate regional engagement and monetization," the 10-Q states. It also warns that measuring MAU on only the final 30 days of a quarter "may not capture user engagement throughout the full quarter." A new item on the list of factors that could harm advertising revenue reads: "changes in the definitions, measurement periods, geographic attribution, or included surfaces used for our audience metrics that make historical, regional, or advertiser comparisons more difficult."

Fourth-quarter guidance

Snap guided fourth-quarter revenue to $1.950 billion to $1.985 billion. Against $1,716.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, that implies growth of 13.6% to 15.6%, according to PPC Land's calculation, and full-year 2026 revenue of roughly $6.80 billion to $6.84 billion. Snap did not break out an advertising forecast, so the guidance includes subscription revenue, which grew 84% in the third quarter.

Adjusted EBITDA is guided to $490 million to $525 million, compared with $357.7 million a year earlier, which PPC Land calculates as an increase of 37% to 47%. The outlook includes planned spending on SPECS, which Hott said Snap continues "to pace against product, ecosystem, and economic milestones."

Buybacks, dilution and 45 million new shares

Snap did not repurchase shares in the third quarter. Over the first nine months it bought back and retired 98.5 million Class A shares for $601.0 million, completing a $500 million program authorized in November 2025 in January and using $350.7 million of a second $500 million program authorized in February 2026. That left $150.0 million available, with repurchases authorized through February 2027.

Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards reached 1.932 billion, up 3.8% year over year. Shares underlying awards alone rose 42% to 214.2 million.

Hott set a target for 2027. "Following the expected completion of our current repurchase program in Q4, we intend to pursue a multi-year approach to dilution management, with the goal of offsetting future dilution and supporting a stable fully diluted share count in 2027," he said. On the day the results were published, the compensation committee approved an amendment to the 2017 Equity Incentive Plan adding 45,000,000 Class A shares to the pool available for awards, according to the 10-Q. The increase was approved the same day by written consent of holders of 231,626,943 Class C shares, representing over 99% of Snap's voting power. The two co-founders control over 99% of that voting power, according to the filing.

SPECS: launched, not yet shipping

Revenue from physical products was not material in the periods presented, according to the 10-Q, which says Snap "announced and began accepting pre-orders for SPECS AR glasses" in June 2026, and the glasses "officially launched in September 2026," the month Snap introduced SPECS Intelligence, an AI service providing "personalized and contextual assistance across SPECS AR glasses and other devices." PPC Land reported in September that Snap priced SPECS at $2,195, with orders taken against a $200 refundable deposit; the 10-Q dates the start of pre-orders to June. The press release now describes a wholly owned subsidiary, Specs Inc., "dedicated to making computing more human."

On the call, Spiegel gave the first usage figure. Snap opened a First Look pop-up at Westfield Century City in Los Angeles in October, and "we've had more than 10,000 demos to date at the pop-up," he said. He described SPECS as "a totally new computing paradigm" that requires people to try them, and said Snap is "really looking forward to beginning to ship SPECS later this fall." In the prepared remarks he presented the product as a combination of see-through augmented reality and AI, citing a golf Lens developed with input from PGA Professionals and enterprise partnerships exploring how technicians can receive visual guidance from remote experts.

The 10-Q is more cautious. Snap "may be unable to achieve sufficient sales volumes or generate sufficient revenue from SPECS AR glasses and related services to recover our significant development, manufacturing, and commercialization costs," it warns, noting that "pre-orders and initial consumer interest may not translate into completed sales or sustained demand." The glasses are regulated as an eyewear product by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to the filing.

Youth safety takes up the longest stretch of the legal disclosures. Hott repeated in the prepared remarks that legal and regulatory outcomes, "including increased regulatory scrutiny on youth-related issues," may result in "significant changes to our products and business practices, increased compliance requirements and legal costs, increased payments for legal judgments and settlements, and negative impacts to user growth and engagement."

The filing lists a dense calendar. Snap reached confidential settlements resolving the first four bellwether trials in the California state court proceeding on addictive design, with the next bellwether trials scheduled for March 2027. In June 2026 it settled the first school district case set for trial, and the next school district trials including Snap are scheduled for February 2027. Trials in the Nevada and New Mexico attorneys general actions are scheduled for August 2027, and trials in the fentanyl cases for late 2027. Snap says any settlements were not material for the periods presented.

Snap also used its risk factors to describe what happened to a much larger competitor. "In August 2026, Meta entered into a settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general, as well as a parallel settlement with the Texas attorney general, involving minimum payments of over $12 billion (and potentially over $18 billion if certain industry contingencies are met)," according to the 10-Q, which adds that certain terms "are intended to establish standards to be adopted more broadly across the social media industry, including through potential settlements with other companies." PPC Land's analysis of the Meta agreement in August framed the totals at $12 billion or $17 billion, depending on contingent installments. "If Snap were subject to similar verdicts or settlements, we could be required to make substantial monetary payments and/or agree to significant changes to Snapchat," Snap wrote. "Our financial resources are substantially more limited than Meta's, and unfavorable outcomes could seriously harm our business." Meta itself booked a $9.89 billion charge for the teen settlement in its third quarter.

Snap's insurers are also contesting coverage for those claims, with a motion by several carriers on the duty to defend set for a hearing on December 10, 2026.

In Europe, two Dutch claim foundations filed collective actions in the Amsterdam District Court on June 9 and September 7, 2026, one asking to let users across the European Union opt in. They allege breaches of EU and Dutch privacy, digital services, AI and consumer laws "in connection with personalized advertising, allegedly addictive features, minor safety, allegedly illegal content, and our My AI chatbot." Separately, a German court has already ruled on My AI data: in September, the Regional Court of Cologne barred Snap from using My AI chat data for advertising without a legal basis, with fines of up to 250,000 euros per breach. The 10-Q does not mention that ruling in its legal proceedings note.

The European Commission opened proceedings under the Digital Services Act on March 26, 2026, covering systemic risk assessments and protections for minors, and Ofcom designated Snapchat a Category 1 service under the UK Online Safety Act in July 2026. Snap said it has notified UK regulators of a plan "to test and implement certain product changes that are designed to address certain regulatory concerns regarding our safety measures."

A new commercial chief in London

The 10-Q includes Ronan Harris's terms as chief commercial officer. His offer letter from Snap Group Limited in London, dated September 10, 2026, sets a start date of September 18, a base salary of £740,000 a year and duties "leading Snap's global commercial organization, including worldwide sales." The exhibit index describes the document as an agreement with "Snap Group Limited Singapore Branch" dated September 22, 2026, a mismatch the filing does not explain.

Why this matters for advertisers and publishers

For buyers, Snap's quarter carries two messages that do not fully reconcile. The company presents Snapchat as a performance channel with better measurement, from doubled app purchase volume to optimization toward third-party measurement. At the same time, overall ad revenue grew 4%, brand budgets shrank, and part of the growth in Chat came from spending shifted out of other Snapchat placements.

Peers reported faster advertising growth. In the same quarter, Meta's advertising revenue rose 26% to $63.06 billion and Reddit's advertising revenue rose 54% to $847 million. Snap's total revenue growth of 14% rests heavily on subscriptions, a line that brings in no advertiser money. Snapchat Platinum, one of the tiers, offers "an ad-free experience" to subscribers, according to the 10-Q.

For publishers and creators, the 42% fall in content and developer partner costs is the clearest number in the report. Snap is moving advertisers toward formats it owns outright, Sponsored Snaps in the inbox and Promoted Places on the map, and away from inventory it shares. How partner content economics evolve with a smaller payout pool is not addressed in the filings.

For analysts and media planners who track Snapchat's reach by market, the 2027 reporting change removes the series that has shown the most sustained weakness. North American and European daily user counts, which declined year over year in each of the last eight and four quarters respectively, will no longer be published. Snap ties the decision to how it wants to run the product, and the stable global ratio between daily and monthly users supports its argument that the two move together. Whether that holds by region, where the declines have been concentrated, will be harder to check once the regional numbers stop.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Snap Inc., the owner of Snapchat, with chief executive Evan Spiegel, chief commercial officer Ronan Harris and chief financial officer Doug Hott, and the advertisers, creators, publishers and analysts who rely on its platform and its disclosures.

What: Snap reported third-quarter 2026 revenue of $1.72 billion, up 14%, with advertising revenue up 4% to $1.37 billion and other revenue, mainly subscriptions, up 84% to $349.7 million. Net income was $56.5 million. Brand advertising declined while direct response reached about 77% of revenue, payments to content partners fell 42%, and Snap said it will replace DAU with global MAU and stop reporting regional DAU and ARPU from 2027.

When: The results, prepared remarks, slides and 10-Q were published on November 4, 2026, covering the quarter ended September 30, 2026. The metric change takes effect with first-quarter 2027 results.

Where: Snap is based in Santa Monica, California. North American daily users fell 6% to 92 million and European daily users fell 1%, while Rest of World grew 9%. Legal matters span U.S. courts, the Amsterdam District Court, the European Commission and Ofcom.

Why: Snap says subscription growth and a shift toward higher-margin formats such as Sponsored Snaps and Promoted Places lifted margins, while lower consumer packaged goods spending in the US and the Middle East weighed on brand advertising. It says monthly users better reflect long-term value than daily use. For marketers, the quarter shows a platform whose advertising growth trails peers, whose revenue increasingly comes from users rather than advertisers, and whose regional audience data will soon be less transparent.