Snap sees Q4 revenue $1.51B-$1.56B, consensus $1.56B

The company said in prepared remarks ahead of its quarterly earnings call, “As we enter Q4, we anticipate continued growth of our global community and our Q4 guidance is built on the assumption that DAU will be approximately 451 million in Q4. We are excited about the potential for Simple Snap (SNAP)chat, Sponsored Snaps, and Promoted Places to contribute to top line growth over time. In particular, we are encouraged by early testing results that show content engagement gains among less frequently engaged users of Snapchat as we believe this can be an important input to impression growth and incremental reach for advertisers. While we believe growth in content engagement and demand for the new ad placements may build over time, many of the changes associated with Simple Snapchat occur immediately as Snapchatters transition to the new user experience, which presents the risk of near term disruption. While we do not currently anticipate a broad roll-out of Simple Snapchat in our most highly monetized markets until Q1 at the earliest, we have now begun limited testing in these markets and may further expand this testing as we move through Q4. In addition, upper funnel advertising from large enterprise clients has historically been an important component of demand in Q4, and this portion of the business has been underperforming our overall ads business in recent quarters. Given these factors, our Q4 guidance range for revenue is $1.510 billion to $1.560 billion, implying year-over-year revenue growth of 11% to 15%.”