Does this mean we won't get the holiday greeting snaps anymore?
Snapchat — which is officially known as Snap Inc. — had to lay off two dozen of their employees last week, half of whom worked in the production content division.
The news was first reported by Cheddar, which stated that the downsizing affected eight different teams. The production content division was hit the worst, as they lost editors in charge of curating user-submitted videos for breaking news and other events.
A handful of employees living in New York and London were also asked to relocate to Los Angeles — where the company’s headquarters is.
The reason for the layoffs is because the company has been failing to significantly grow this past couple of years. Snapchat being only a 6-year-old business, the company is looking to cut costs as they’ve lost money in hardware and app redesign.
A recent report from The Daily Beast also says that, while Snapchat is still primarily being used as a messaging tool, only 20 percent of the users are actively viewing the company’s Discover Edition daily. This has caused some companies — such as CNN’s Snap — to pullback their marketing from Snapchat.
Snapchat now hopes to use human editors to review content that will be featured in the redesigned feed and move the platform to become more of an accurate and useful source of news.
“Having a scalable business model isn’t enough,” CEO Evan Spiegel said in a memo via Cheddar. “We also need to have an organization that scales internally. This means that we must become exponentially more productive as we add additional resources and team members.”
The question that remains to be answered (although I feel like, when looking at the numbers, the answer is somewhat obvious): do Snapchat users really care about the news segments of the app, or are they just there to use it as a form of messaging and social media. I know what side of the question I fall on, at least.
What side do you fall on? Do you want to see Snapchat redesign their app, or are you happy the way it is? Let us know in the comments below.
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