Snap says iOS privacy changes hit its ad business harder than expected

In an earnings call Thursday, Snap said that it failed to meet revenue expectations for its third quarter. Snap reported $1.07 billion in Q3 revenue, missing Wall Street’s hopes that the company would bring in $1.1 billion. The company notched 306 million daily active users, up from the 293 million it reported in Q2. That […]

Snap is launching a global studio to develop branded AR experiences

Snap announced on Tuesday that it’s launching a global creative studio to help brands develop augmented reality (AR) advertising and experiences. The new studio is called ‘Arcadia’ and aims to help companies develop experiences that can be used across web platforms and app-based AR environments. The studio will partner with brands and creators to engage […]

One-time TikTok rival Byte relaunches as Clash, an app for video creators and their top fans

When the Trump administration announced it would ban TikTok in the U.S., a number of alternative short-form video apps began to flourish, as users hedged their bets on a potential TikTok exit. Among these was Byte, an app co-created by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, which topped 1.3 million downloads in its first week alone. But […]

Inkitt books $59M investment, wants to turn its data-driven, self-publishing platform into a multi-media powerhouse

Book sales during the pandemic went up, and it seems the amount we are reading did, too. Now Inkitt, the startup that operates a free, popular platform of the same name for anyone to write and publish stories — stories that Inkitt then analyses using data science to determine which of them to take to […]

TikTok and Snap alums launch mayk.it, a social music creation app, with $4M in seed funding

After living through the global upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers are re-evaluating their career path. Stefan Heinrich Henriquez, a former Head of Global Marketing at TikTok and Chief Marketing Officer at Cameo, is one of them. “I have been thinking about music since my time at TikTok, and I was really thinking about […]

TikTok is building its own AR development platform, TikTok Effect Studio

Both Facebook and Snap offer tools that allow developers to build out augmented reality (AR) experiences and features for their own respective family of apps. Now, TikTok is looking to do the same. The company recently launched a new creative toolset called TikTok Effect Studio, currently in private beta testing, which will allow its own […]