Hi Everyone. This is Take Off. We're like a hidden Easter egg in your favorite video game - surprising, delightful, and adding an extra layer of fun to your tech news consumption.

Here's what we're serving up today:

• A Slap for Snap 👎️ 

• Asteroids ☄️

• Trending Tools ⚒️ 

A Slap for Snap 👎️ 

The advertising market might be signaling a sunnier horizon but not for at least one social media player. 

It seems like the ad market is still gloom and doom for Snapchat. 

Snap's Q4 '24 financials are in, and spoiler alert, they're not popping champagne over there. Instead, they're staring down the barrel of a $10B loss since 2015.

Snap has turned a profit in just 1 out of their last 36 quarters, back in Q4 2021 - a false dawn for the company’s finances at the time. 

The Wolves at Wall St. haven’t received this news well and are starting to lose patience for Snap’s turnaround story. 

While Snap's ad-selling rivals, Meta, Google, and Amazon, are throwing digital ad dollars around like confetti at a wedding, Snapchat is like the kid at the party whose balloon just got popped.

However, the company is determined for their story to turn around and is planning multiple things to make sure their stories ARE the only thing that vanishes, NOT their revenue.

1/ Snapchat+

Snap had announced their premium membership, Snapchat+ back in July of 2022, which seems to be doing pretty well. It’s like their own VIP club. 

The service which gives access to exclusive features for $3.99/mo now has 7M active members and is on an annualized run-rate of $240M. 

2/ Better Ads

Realizing that their lifeline is tied to ad dollars, Snapchat is on a mission to woo advertisers with shiny new ad features.

“We are focused on executing against our roadmap to deliver improvements to our direct-response advertising platform to drive improved results for our advertising partners and accelerate top line growth.”

3/ Target

Snap is shifting more of its focus toward user growth and deepening engagement in their more monetizable geographies, including North America and Europe. They're banking on these areas to not just swipe right but also put a ring on it.

In the grand scheme of digital drama, Snapchat's been the platform everyone's rooting for to pull off a grand finale. With gloomy days but a spirit that won't quit, Snapchat's story is far from over.

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

Solana's token skyrockets to $160, becoming the fourth-largest cryptocurrency. Thanks to its bustling NFT marketplace, DeFi ecosystem, and meme coin magic, it's up 676% from last year. 🪙📈 

Reddit rolls out free-form ads, mimicking user posts to boost engagement ahead of its IPO. These ads blend images, videos, and text, aiming for a natural feel. 🏞️🤑 

Anthropic just released the smallest and fastest Claude 3 model, Haiku! It is capable of processing up to 21,000 tokens, or around 30 pages of text, per second for prompts under 32,000 tokens. 🫢⏩️ 

⚒️ Trending Tools ⚒️

💪 Spur - World's first Copilot for fitness trainers

💻️ Levi V2 - Build stunning AI-powered websites

🌐 Aptible - No Infrastructure Platform to deploy in seconds

⚡️ Zap - Craft free cover letters instantly, tailored to your resume

📰 Recommended Reading 📰

AI Jane: Artificial intelligence investment journalist building an easy to read ai investing email newsletter. Get smarter about investing in ai in 5 minutes.

The Aurorean: This newsletter scours 100+ sources so you don’t have to. The Aurorean is your guide to discover the essential news, research, beauty and humor in science every week.

The EV Universe: Keep up with the electric vehicle industry.

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