Meta is trouncing Snap in Digital ads — here’s why
In this screengrab, CEO of Snap Inc. Evan Spiegel takes the stage at the virtual Snap Partner Summit 2021 on May 20, 2021 in Los Angeles.
Snap Partner Summit 2021 – Snap Inc | Getty Images
The online ad market is bouncing back. But the spoils are not being evenly shared.
After Meta blew away Wall Street estimates last week in its fourth-quarter earnings report, pushing the stock to a record, smaller rival Snap came up short on Tuesday, sending investors rushing for the exits.
Meta’s ad business, which includes Facebook and Instagram, grew 24% from a year earlier, lifting the company to its fastest rate of expansion since mid-2021. Snap reported an increase of just 5% year-over-year, its sixth straight quarter of single-digit growth or a decline in sales. That’s slower than advertising growth at Google, Amazon and Microsoft in addition to Meta.
Based on investors’ reactions, Snap is headed for one of its worst days on the market since its debut seven years ago. The stock dropped 33% in extended trading to $11.75. Its two biggest one-day declines were a 43% drop in May 2022 and a 39% plunge two months later.
Meta, by contrast, soared 20% on Friday after the company reported a tripling in profit, beat estimates on the top and bottom lines, issued an optimistic forecast and announced that it’s paying a dividend for the first time.
“We’re seeing the bigger companies get bigger and smaller companies are slower to rebound,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “Snap is one of those” in the latter camp, she said.
For the first quarter, Snap projected revenue of $1.095 billion to $1.135 billion, which would equal growth of between about 11% and 15%. The middle of the range — $1.115 billion — was just below analysts’ average estimate of $1.117 billion.
Broadly, the digital ad market is recovering from a brutal 2022, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates led brands to reel in spending. Now ad platforms are seeing improvements from a more stable economy along with upcoming events like the 2024 Olympics in Paris and the the presidential election later this year.
As Enberg noted, “the rebound has been uneven” and has benefited Meta and other giant tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon, which all reported advertising growth in the double digits for the fourth quarter.
On Snap’s earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Evan Spiegel faced questions from analysts about why the company is lagging behind competitors.
Rich Greenfield of LightShed Partners asked Spiegel if Snap’s smaller size compared to Meta represents “a fundamental long-term issue.” Spiegel responded by saying that Snap is “certainly one of the largest Internet services,” and while some platforms are bigger, “I think there’s enormous opportunity for us to continue to grow our business.”
Barclays analyst Ross Sandler asked Spiegel, “Why aren’t we seeing more progress and getting that growth rate up to the levels of the broader digital ad industry?”
‘Wish we were moving faster’
Spiegel started the answer by discussing his excitement around “the progress we’re seeing especially in our lower funnel business,” referring to the upgraded capabilities of its online advertising platform.
However, he acknowledged some level of disappointment.
“Obviously we wish we were moving faster,” Spiegel said. “But we’re working as hard as we can and you know we’re pleased by what we’re seeing in the direct-response business.”
Both Meta and Snap were hit hard in 2022 due to a weakening ad market and Apple’s iOS privacy update, which made it harder for social media companies to target users. Both companies said they were rebuilding their ad technology in response and told investors that they were pouring money into artificial intelligence.
UKRAINE – 2023/03/11: In this photo illustration, Temu, LLC logo seen on a smartphone and on a pc screen. (Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Meta is seeing the benefits, sparked by a surge in spending from Chinese retailers, which are trying to reach the company’s billions of users spread across the globe. Meta has 2.11 billion daily active users, compared with 414 million for Snap.
Spiegel echoed commentary from prior quarters and said Snap is “investing heavily” into machine learning and AI technologies to enhance its online ad platform.
Enberg told CNBC that, based on feedback she’s heard from advertisers, Meta is further ahead in its development. And the company’s size provides an inherent advantage.
“Meta’s platforms are much bigger than Snapchat, meaning that they have more data and users to work with as they’re rebuilding it,” Enberg said. “Snap has clearly made progress, and we saw some of that in its earnings, both this quarter and last quarter, but it seems to be taking a longer time for the company.”
Snap has recently tried to distance itself from the broader social media universe and has pitched itself as more of a messaging company, Enberg said. The company disclosed sales in its Snapchat+ subscription service for the first time and said it had an annualized revenue run rate of $249 million in 2023. The service now has 7 million subscribers, up from 5 million in the previous quarter. Snap debuted the product in 2022 for $3.99 a month.
But revenue from subscriptions is currently minimal. Advertising is still what matters, and “the reality is that it’s competing for the same social dollars,” Enberg said.
“I think the confidence level from investors in Snap is concerning going forward,” she said.
WATCH: Meta is too optimistic on revenue and cost growth in 2024.
The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.
Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.
The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.
“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.
In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.
“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.
WATCH: Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity
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