Snap Ceo Says 'environment Of Uncertainty' Around Tiktok Has Boosted Snapchat

Snap CEO Even Spiegel said the company got an engagement boost when TikTok went dark.

Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images

• Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the "environment of uncertainty" around TikTok is good for its business.
• Snap saw a boost in engagement when TikTok "went dark" last month, Spiegel told investors.
• Snap's daily active users rose to 453 million in Q4 amid TikTok's uncertain future.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told investors this week that his company benefited from TikTok's uncertain future in the United States.

Snap told investors in an earnings call Tuesday that it increased its daily active user count to 453 million in Q4, a 9% year-over-year increase.

While Snap has seen a general uptick in users, Spiegel said the company saw a significant traffic boost when TikTok briefly shut down on January 19.

TikTok briefly stopped providing service in the United States after the Supreme Court upheld a law forcing its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app. TikTok reversed course after newly inaugurated President Donald Trump promised to address the issue.

Trump signed an executive order on January 21 granting TikTok another 75 days to find a buyer. The social media app's future remains uncertain.

Spiegel told investors that Snap isn't looking too closely at the engagement boost it received during the TikTok outage but said he thinks the overall volatility of the short-form video space is helping the company in the long run.

"We're not trying to draw too many conclusions from some of the engagement lift we saw when [TikTok] went dark for that brief period of time. I would say that the overall environment of uncertainty is benefiting our business," he said on the call.

Snap said in the earnings release that the number of creators posting to Snapchat grew by 40% year-over-year in the fourth quarter thanks to its Snap Star program, which program in which Snap partners with creators.

"More than one billion Snaps were shared publicly on Snapchat every month in Q4 from our community, creators, and media partners," the release says.