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It was less than two years ago that Snap was out pitching itself as the next Facebook to bankers ahead of its highly anticipated initial public offering.
Now it looks as though Snapchat, the company’s flagship app, may already be done growing.
Snap reports its second-quarter results today after the market close. And the consensus from analysts is that Snap’s audience will grow by just one million daily active users, according to FactSet. At least one analyst, RBC’s Mark Mahaney, thinks it won’t grow at all.
That’s surprising, considering that Snapchat added 21 million new users in the same period two years ago. The app was starting to show the kind of rapid, accelerating growth that investors love to see with consumer companies — especially those with a business model that depends on advertising. It turns out that was Snap’s peak growth period.
Things started slowing down just before its IPO — perhaps not coincidentally right around the time Instagram started copying Snapchat’s best features — and we wrote that Snapchat’s growth numbers looked a lot more like Twitter’s than Facebook’s. If Snapchat’s user base has indeed flatlined, it will definitely look more like Twitter than Facebook. (We won’t mention Myspace yet.)
That’s not what you want to hear if you’re a Snapchat investor, especially just six quarters into its life as a public company.
Last Snap earnings, CEO Evan Spiegel discussed the company’s big app redesign, which wasn’t very popular with users. The company ultimately rolled back parts of the redesign and blamed some of its lower-than-expected revenue and user growth on the changes.
Update: Snap reported that it actually lost users last quarter.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
