(BI Intelligence)

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Snap’s geofilters now garner more than twice as many daily views as they did in February, according to TechCrunch.

Snap’s geofilters are viewed over 1.5 million times through Story and message viewers every minute — which equates to 2.16 billion daily views, doubling its last reported 1 billion views per day, in February.

This likely indicates Snap has been successful in leveraging location data from its partnerships with Factual and Foursquare. Prior to these partnerships, a small number of popular places and cities had unique geofilters. Now, nearly any close by business or landmark can be turned into a geofilter to overlay on user snaps.

The increase in geofilter viewership is a bright spot for Snap, which faces pressure to address its slowing user growth. Snap has yet to report Q2 2017 numbers, but it only added 8 million daily users in the three months through March to reach 166 million. Instagram Stories, on the other hand, has grown to 250 million daily users from 200 million in April.

The newly hit milestone comes as Snap emphasizes development of location focused technology. Below are some observations on why the company is pushing this area:

• Building out location technology fits into Snap’s broader advertising efforts. Snap recently acquired Zenly, which developed technology for user location sharing, and launched Snap Map shortly after. Better location technology could also allow Snap a bigger and more precise data set on users’ locations, which could lure advertisers to the platform who look to measure whether ads actually drove consumers to make in-store purchases.

• More specifically, it could attract more SMBs to advertise on the platform. Snap has largely focused on attracting bigger advertisers to its platform. However, with the increasing amount of location data Snap can now leverage, smaller brands and advertisers looking to run location specific ads may be encouraged to opt for more geofilter ad campaigns.

• Geofilters could also boost user-generated revenue opportunities for Snap. Snap introduced a feature in June that lets users in the US create their own geofilters directly from the mobile app. Users submit tens of thousands of custom geofilter designs daily, according to Snap. Assuming the geofilters are sold at $6, which is where pricing starts, 10,000 user-created geofilters a day roughly equates to at least $60,000 in geofilter revenue for Snap. Although this does not significantly increase Snap’s bottom line — this equates to less than 1% of Snap’s Q1 2017 revenue — it’s a sign of the feature’s popularity, which is something Snap could tout to get more advertisers to run geofilter ad campaigns.