Snap announced Q1 earnings, beating estimates with 12 percent year-over-year revenue growth to $1.53 billion. Net loss was $89 million – down from $140 million YoY – and adjusted EBITDA was $233 million. The stock dipped in after-hours trading and rebounded this morning.

Explicitly driving revenue growth was continued AR efforts. That means mobile AR lenses today, including 9 billion daily lens engagements, and monetization that flows from it. The latter involves sponsored lenses that let brands market themselves in creative and immersive ways.

But beyond that business story today, Snap continues to expand from handheld to headworn AR. This includes its highly anticipated consumer-geared Spectacles that are scheduled to launch later this year; as well as its newly-formed and wholly-owned Specs Inc. subsidiary.

Specs also support a broader narrative at Snap around revenue diversification. Due to the broader headwinds in the advertising world, Snap, like many others, is cultivating non-advertising monetization such as subscriptions, where it currently sees a $1 billion+ revenue run rate.

Joining that diversification narrative – which has gained Wall Street favor over the past few weeks alone – Snap is making active moves towards leaner operations. That includes eliminating 10,000 jobs – 16 percent of its workforce – and plans to trim $500 million in OpEx spending in 2026.

From Specs to Subscribers: Snap’s Revenue Diversification Moves

Highlight Reel

With that backdrop and macro-environmental context, what were the AR highlights from Snap’s Q1 earnings call? We joined the call and extracted AR-relevant segments to save time for AR Insider readers. Here they are in no particular order, with quotes attributed accordingly.

Lens Engagement Figures (David Ometer, Head of Investor Relations)

More than 75% of Snapchatters are engaging with augmented reality every day on average, and our community uses Lenses in our Snapchat camera 9 billion times per day on average. AI-powered Lens creation is transforming our AR ecosystem, with more than 400,000 Lenses submitted in Q1, increasing more than 150% year-over-year. The significant growth this quarter was driven primarily by the adoption of new Lens creation tools such as Easy Lens, our free tool designed to make Lens creation simpler, more fun, and more personal. The Map continues to play a growing role as a way to stay up to date with friends and discover new places.

Priming the Pump for Consumer Specs (David Ometer, Head of Investor Relations)

Snap is uniquely positioned to shape that future because we bring together a scaled augmented reality platform, a large developer ecosystem, and a vertically integrated software and hardware stack through Lens Studio, Snap OS, and Specs. Over the past year, we continued to improve our platform with major Snap OS updates, new tools and APIs for developers, and new experiences that expand what is possible on Specs across learning, gaming, utility, and AI-powered assistance. We are also seeing encouraging momentum in our developer ecosystem, with the number of Lenses submitted for Specs increasing 28% year-over-year. We are inspired by the range of Lens experiences developers are building for Specs. Early examples include Fossils from XR company UXR Immersive Studios, an interactive AR learning experience that uses spatial puzzle mechanics to let users uncover and assemble prehistoric fossils while bringing extinct animals to life.

Artel from Egor Riabcov, an AR drawing app that lets users create in 3D space with a wide range of brushes, colors and effects, and now includes physics-based interactions that allow drawings to respond to gravity and motion. The Heist by Gropile, a co-located AR puzzle game in which players solve changing modules and challenges to disarm an anti-theft system, either solo or with others on Specs or mobile. We look forward to sharing more as we get closer to launch, and we hope you will join us at Augmented World Expo on June 16th as we continue our work to make computing more human. 

Specs Development (Evan Spiegel during Q&A segment)

The way that people are using their computers is changing really dramatically, I think that that’s gonna be evident, you know, in the adoption of wearables and the adoption of Spectacles over time. People are gonna spend less time hunched over their computers or their phones, typing away on keyboards, and spend more time supervising agents who are doing that work on their behalf. We actually had a team member who, with AI, built out a pretty cool lens called Agent Center where you can, you know, oversee and manage your agents through Spectacles, you know, with the current developer version of the glasses. Which is a pretty cool way, you know, to stay on top of what your agents are getting done for you without carrying your laptop around. Certainly, I think a lot of opportunity there, and the way that people are using computing is changing so fundamentally in so many ways at this moment.

Revenue Diversification via Lens+ (David Ometer, Head of Investor Relations)

AI-powered Lens interactions are deepening user engagement and increasingly serving as a natural discovery layer for premium AI-powered experiences. Lens+ is emerging as a key extension of this strategy, offering subscribers access to exclusive Lenses and AI-powered features. Early traction has been encouraging, with Lens+ contributing to higher subscription ARPU and gross margin expansion. We continue to innovate on additional direct value propositions for our community, including the launch of creator subscriptions in Q1. We believe this offering can deepen creator engagement on Snapchat, strengthen relationships between creators and their audiences, and further diversify our revenue streams over time. We are excited about the upcoming launch of Spectacles and our mission to make computing more human. For more than a decade, we have believed that smart glasses will be the most important computing platform transition since the smartphone.

Revenue Diversification via Spectacles (Evan Spiegel during Q&A segment)

We worked on Spectacles for, I think, something like 12 years now. We really have believed that we can innovate and build awesome products for our community that they wanna buy. I think seeing that reflected in the direct revenue business and in Snapchat+ has really built a lot more confidence, you know, in the team because we love to innovate for our community. I think, you know, being able to demonstrate that our community’s willing to pay for that innovation, I think, really bodes well for the future of the platform and the future of Spectacles. Certainly a lot of opportunity there. We’re really excited to have more diversified revenue.

Aspirations & Accomplishments

So there you have it. We’ll be watching Snap and the rest of the AR market closely, as always, to see which aspirations turn into accomplishments in Q2 and the rest of FY 2026. For Snap, all eyes will be on the launch of consumer Specs, and more information we’ll get at AWE USA in June.