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I don’t buy Snapchat’s numbers.

Their metrics all suggest an inflated user count.

How so? They define a Daily Active User "as a registered Snapchat user who opens the Snapchat application at least once during a defined 24-hour period" in their quarterly report:

Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001564408/000156459...

Snapchat has been more aggressive at push notifications (such as @xxx friend posted a new story!) to move more MAUs / WAUs into DAUs category.

These strategies have been employed by other competitors as aggressive as well though. So it is probably still comparable. I would say Snapchat's metrics are more "authentic" a few years ago, but now it is more "comparable".

To be fair over counting users will affect ARPU as well, no free lunch (and we sorta saw that in the numbers this quarter tbf)

> Their metrics all suggest an inflated user count.

Evidence?

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