Snapchat now has about as many daily active users as Facebook
That's about as many as Facebook, which reported 936 million daily active users in March, even though the social network was founded about 7 years earlier.
However, Snapchat users watch roughly half as many videos as Facebook users every day, according to a recent Bloomberg interview with Spiegel.
Snapchat hasn't given an official user count in the past, though sources told The Wall Street Journal that it had more than 100 million monthly active users last August. If that number was accurate, Spiegel's metric shows a pretty big leap. About 65% of those 100 million daily active users are creating their own content every day, he added.
Spiegel says he thinks daily active users is a more accurate number than monthly active users, but that, internally, Snapchat actually measures hourly active users.
With the prevalence of mobile phones which people always have with them, monthly active users isn't specific enough, he says.
The startup, currently valued at more than $15 billion, has been ramping up its advertising lately, and this new user metric might make its fledgling ad product more attractive.
Right now, advertisers can buy placement in "Stories" - collections of photos and videos that the app sources from lots of people, based around events or locations - and Spiegel promised that the company won't let brands use Snapchat in the same way regular people do.
"We don't want brands to act like people, because they're not people!" he says. "So, we don't make it easy for them to do that."
Part of that is making sure ads never appear in the personal conversations people are having. Spiegel says users are checking out more Stories than regular Snapchats, and that ads would seem very out of place within normal Snaps.
"We won't put ads in communication," he says. "It's like, 'Get out of here. We're talking."