When Snapchat became public earlier this year, they closed the market 44% higher than their initial IPO of $17 to $24.48 but it appears that this high hasn’t lasted very long for Snap Inc. It’s now 8 months since their successful breakout onto the markets and things seem to have gone downhill.
Snap Inc. has released their Q3 report recorded only 4.5 million new users to their existing 178 million existing users. Financial expectations also fell short with earnings of $207.9m against the predicted $237m Q3 earnings.
To combat these dismal figures Evan Spiegel has launched an entire redesign campaign to make Snapchat more competitive against the currently dominating Instagram and its 300 million users. Spiegel hopes to address user concerns that Snapchat is too difficult or complicated to use to gain new users to their lagging base.
It doesn’t stop with an easier to use platform, Spiegel has also announced that algorithmically personalised stories feed, which provides more personalised content for users. “We hope that showing the right Stories to the right audience will help grow engagement and monetization for our partners and for Snapchat”, Spiegel explains.
With optimistic predictions for the fourth quarter only time will tell if this game pays off.