I have snapchat on my phone, not because I use it... my daughter likes to make funny faces. She does NOT post. Am I counted as an active user?
The fact that they have you and your daughter engaging with the product at all is a meaningful thing for the business. There's a lot they can do with even this cursory engagement over time.
I am not a Snap user period. To count my daughter as a user is just plain sad from an investment point of view. She is not going to have a job for 9 years minimum. That means I control the purse strings.
Sanp is like those games that have a gajillion users and then simply die as no one plays them anymore.
(And the fact that there was a monetary transaction for the paper is not unlike going through the pains of downloading and installing an app on your phone.)
That means roughly this:
* It's a funnel (one that is heavily tracked)
* They know how often and how deep users' engagement patterns are and how they shift over time, over different feature launches, and over the age of their users among other parameters.
* They know what it takes to get a lightly engaging user to become one that is more deeply engaging and they know the rate at which this conversion happens.
* They have cohorts of users and they know what types of users move which way through the funnel and how fast.
* Using all this data, they have at their disposal different levers to pull (growth, marketing, product) to move the numbers in the right direction.
Again, all of this doesn't mean that Snapchat will be successful in converting you or your daughter into a heavy Snapchat user today or even tomorrow. But you're painting too simple of a picture using a single high level metric and logical simplification of a process that's very complicated.
The biggest point I want to make here is that NO TWO USERS ARE THE SAME. So to use a high level metric that conflates different types of users by definition and then making an implication about the health of a company using this specific metric's weakness is just silly. There is data that you don't have access to and you're not recognizing that.
Not trying to come across as snarky, but trying to setup an easy analogy :).
When are we going to say; What the hell is the point of this? Users "using" something doesn't make it profitable unless they are willing to pay you for it. Furthermore, advertising IS NOT working. Look at retail, malls AND name brands... Horrible performance for the bulk of recent memory.