Snap's first quarterly earnings are a dud

The parent company of the ephemeral messaging app generated $149.6 million in Q1 2017 revenue, which is lower than the $156 million analysts expected. It lost a whopping $2.2 billion, although it says that most of that is due to paying out stock-based employee compensation.

Other numbers:

• Daily active users: 166 million, up 36% from a year ago, and 5% from last quarter. This is key, since Snap's entire value story is about user growth.
• Average revenue per user: $0.90, up 181% from a year ago, and 14% from the previous quarter. Note that Snap only really started to monetize in 2015, so the significant increase over the last year is no surprise.
• Hosting costs per DAU: $0.60, slightly up from a year ago ($0.52), but lower from last quarter ($0.72), suggesting Snap is doing fairly well at controlling its hosting costs.