Snapchat To Be Redesigned Post Q3 Reports

Snap Inc., is planning to redesign Snapchat in an attempt to reach a broader audience. This app, which introduced the disappearing messages, is working on a significant overhaul after the user growth in the last three months fell well below what investment analysts expected.

This California based firm earned $ 207.9 million in revenue with a loss of $ 0.14 per share and added just 4.5 million users in the last quarter. Snapchat’s earnings dropped by 20% in after hours trading, closing at $ 15.12. The company also lost $ 443 million while their capital expenditures also rose up to $ 25.9 million. Speaking about the changes, CEO of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel said, “One thing we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback.”

The redesigning may help the company open the app to a huge audience of new users. The drastic changes could also alienate some users and undercut Snap’s cool factor. But, according to Spiegel, Snap was willing to take the risk for long term gain. The app is exploring new ways of surfacing its content in a personalized and more relevant way, while still maintaining the exploratory nature of the service. Spiegel added the company will also build more tools for people to share content with audiences beyond just their friends, by next year.

According to Snap’s earnings letter, Snapchat will integrate premium video and search based content in a manner similar to the social media giant Facebook. Despite being the first to introduce the 24 hour stories, Facebook owned Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status both now have 300 million daily users while Snapchat has only 178 million daily users. The new and improved Snap will have a more algorithmically sorted feed, instead of using the reverse chronological feed that shows what happens to have been posted most recently.

Along with Snapchat, microblogging site Twitter also announced a major change in its services. The character limit of the microblogging site has been increased to 280 characters from its iconic 140 character limit.