Spiegel said the social media major, which has set up a local team here, may look at strategic investments even as it continues to strike partnerships to push its augmented reality efforts.
Edited excerpts from the interview:
You mentioned India in your earnings call recently, saying your expansion efforts here continue to be successful and that you are using the learnings for new geographies. Could you tell us more about that?
Indian culture lends itself to visual communication. It’s hard to capture that feeling, that emotion of watching all those Diwali lanterns soar into the sky in words. It’s almost unimaginable. And what’s been so exciting to see is the way that Snapchat has been able to capture just the visual richness of India and really empower a new way of communicating between people. We have also built a local team and we work to create locally relevant content and augmented reality experiences.
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Which are the other geographies you talked about?
We now have very large businesses in Europe, the Middle East… Increasingly we’re starting to think about growing our business in Southeast Asia and Africa. But what’s really been exciting about India is it’s one of the first places we made a really big bet when we were a startup… its really expensive to build a new team and a totally new country and invest in localised content. You don’t know how it’s going to work out. And so, for us, India has been a really great place to learn about how to grow our business by creating locally relevant experiences.
You said earlier that India now has about 100 million monthly active users here, how about the ad revenues from here?
Advertisers follow our audiences. As you mentioned, we have 100 million people using us across India… it’s now becoming more exciting for brands to partner with us and leverage our advertising platform to reach their consumers. It’s still very early for us. I will say as we’re growing our business in India, and our primary focus has really just been on the product experience to date, we’ll continue to focus on the product, product experience and run experiments with brands who want to reach our audience.
Would it be restricted to partnerships or are you looking at some sort of strategic investments in India?
We have made strategic investments in the past and may do so again in the future. There’s so much incredible innovation and entrepreneurship happening in India… but I can’t talk about any specific deal we’re working on right now. Partnerships are usually a way for us to get to know people and see if there’s a bigger strategic opportunity in the future.
What’s the update on your brand partnerships with the likes of Flipkart that you had announced a few months ago for augmented reality?
We’re really excited about augmented reality shopping. In the past when you were just using the desktop internet, you had to look at little pictures. Now with augmented reality you can try on that clothing yourself without even having to change your outfit, just using your phone. What we’re trying to do is scale those AR shopping efforts because what we find is that many brands either don’t have 3D assets or it can be very expensive to create and manage these. We’re really excited to expand our shopping with Flipkart.
Could you tell us what’s happening on the mobile device front? Are you trying an ecosystem play?
That’s definitely been a priority for us. One of the things that we’ve done lately is partner with original equipment manufacturers to provide augmented reality experiences directly through the smartphone camera. So rather than even having to download Snapchat, you can just open up your Samsung phone and use the camera. It’s helped expose way more people to augmented reality. We’re doing a lot of other things to help improve distribution of Snapchat, like preload deals, so Snapchat comes installed on different devices. And we’ll continue to expand our augmented reality. partnerships.
How are you looking at the Indian regulations around data protection, privacy and content moderation on social media platforms?
Tech platforms have an enormous responsibility as they reach a huge audience. One of the things that we talked about earlier that’s helped us is that we self-regulate our content. So we already proactively curate the content that’s widely distributed on our platform through things like Discover or Spotlight. In addition, we’ve really tried to cultivate a positive and constructive relationship with governments around the world because what we find is that governments are very focused on developing a digital economy. They understand those benefits very tangibly, but I think they want that economy to develop in a responsible way.
Talk a little about creator economy monetisation.. it’s so big now, especially with TikTok’s success.
One of the really exciting things has, of course, been the rollout of Spotlight, which allows anyone to reach a really large audience on Snapchat with user-generated content and be rewarded for it. We’re rolling out other ways, like gifting, for example. So if you’re watching a creator’s story and you really enjoy it, you can start a conversation with them and send them a gift to show your appreciation. We also help creators attach shops to their stories so they can sell merchandise.
You said TikTok is the future of social media, and that people are consuming Spotlight more than Stories.
Spotlight and Stories are totally different products. Stories is an enormous business for us and much bigger obviously than Spotlight even though Spotlight is growing faster. Spotlight offers something totally different to creators, which is the ability to reach a really large audience even if you don’t already have a following. I think this is a new paradigm for social media that video content is distributed on merit, rather than the number of followers. That’s a big deal for creativity because it allows any creator, regardless of how famous they are, to be successful.
Snap said it has stopped all business out of Russia, how are you watching the developments considering you have a presence in Ukraine?
It has been an absolutely heartbreaking time for our team… We’ve got about 300 people who are based out of Ukraine. Snap’s augmented reality platform came out of a product called Looksery, which was built in Ukraine, so for a very long time, we’ve gotten to know the Ukrainian people, they’re our friends, they’re our team members. Our number one priority has just been on the health and safety of our team members.
There’s been a lot of conversation around misinformation on social media around the war, what is Snap doing to stop this?
Accurate information is very important.. This is one of the reasons why since the beginning, we’ve operated a curated content platform. We realized people who are just hanging out and talking with their friends should be held to a very different standard than broadcasters who are reaching a large audience.. Snap has a closed and curated content platform where we partner with talented journalism teams globally to provide accurate and timely information to our community especially in times like these.
