Shares of the social media company snap were pounded on Monday. Shares fell to $12, an astonishing 74.5% loss year to date for the stock which was trading at $83.11 in September of 2021.
Snap warned the pain could continue in a securities and Exchange filing last month, noting it will likely fall short of its Q2 guidance when earnings are officially reported.
Dwarfed by rivals Instagram and TikTok, which already has more than 1 billion users, Snap is taking the brunt of the beating in the sector. The issue Snap faces is how ad-reliant tech companies are seeing investors wonder if their business models will be able to weather the coming economic storms.
Google is also getting hit, however its decline has been just 22.9% year to date. That is below the broader S&P 500 decline, but nowhere near Snap’s collapse. Even Facebook parent Meta, despite the failures of the Metaverse and its abandoning of some technology development, like with the civilian version of Portal, is only down 47.8% year to date.
Snap’s collapse comes despite technically doing well on its fundamentals. Q1 2022 yearnings showed an 18% year over year growth of daily average users, as well as a 38% year over year growth in revenues, to $1.06 billion. However those numbers were a decline from its 2021 performance when daily average users grew by 22% year over year, and revenue growth was 66%.
One big factor impacting Snap as well as other ad-based tech companies was Apple instituting its APP Tracking Transparency feature, which allows uses to opt out of being tracked by apps across different apps and websites. This prevents advertisers from targeting specific users with specific ads, and prevents them from being able to tell who has seen their ads and how their ad campaigns have performed.
Snap CBO Jeremi Gorman said in an earnings call that the company is focusing on improving ad targeting, but that it will take time. It would appear investors are choosing not to wait.