Sources: Snapchat has 150M daily active users, higher than Twitter's estimated 140M
The four-year-old messaging app is said to have 150 million people using it each day. — Snapchat Inc. has 150 million people using the service each day, said people familiar with the matter.
Context & Ripple Effects
The milestone is the payoff of a year of video-scale signals: Snapchat went from drawing 4 billion daily video views in September 2015 to 10 billion daily views by April 2016, with over a third of daily users creating Stories. The user number is the natural next disclosure — and it comes from unnamed sources rather than a company report, since Snapchat remains private while Twitter must publish its figures quarterly.
Passing Twitter's estimated 140 million daily users matters because it flips the pecking order between a four-year-old camera app and an incumbent public network, and it sets up the long arc the coverage traces afterward: 190 million daily users by 2019, then 500 million MAUs by 2021.
First-order effects
- Twitter's pitch to advertisers — that it is a top-tier daily-habit platform — takes a direct hit, since Snapchat now claims more daily users despite disclosing nothing itself.
- Snapchat gains leverage in mobile-video ad negotiations, having already matched Facebook on daily video views before surpassing Twitter on daily audience.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's copycat push into Stories hardens from imitation into necessity; its later disclosure of 500 million daily Stories users across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp shows how directly the format war escalated.
- Advertisers weighing Twitter against Snapchat can no longer default to the incumbent on reach, pressuring Twitter's pricing for the same youth-skewed video budgets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's center of gravity shifts from broadcast-style timelines toward camera-first messaging apps — a trajectory the corpus confirms, with Snapchat later reporting 750M+ monthly users and monetizing via subscriptions like Snapchat+.
- Private companies disclosing selective metrics through sources, while public rivals must report quarterly, becomes a recurring asymmetry that shapes how platform scale is perceived and priced.
The trend: Camera-first messaging apps are overtaking timeline-based social networks as the daily-habit layer of mobile media, forcing incumbents to clone the format to defend ad budgets.