Snap is trying to unify person expertise throughout Highlight and Tales

Snap’s inventory plunged 30% on Tuesday after announcing Q4 2023 results that didn’t meet analyst expectations. On the earnings name, CEO Evan Spiegel mentioned the corporate is taking a number of steps this 12 months to gasoline development. These embody unifying expertise throughout Tales and Highlight, bettering advert interactions throughout platforms, and growing engagement and person development in North America and Europe.

The social community launched its TikTok-rival Spotlight over three years ago and it has seen promising outcomes. Complete time spent watching Highlight elevated 175% year-on-year and common month-to-month energetic customers grew 35% year-on-year, based on the company’s Q4 2023 earnings release.

Spiegel mentioned that the corporate needs to leverage issues like rating mechanisms and advice engines from Highlight and port to Tales for higher engagement. The corporate needs to begin with merging the interface and navigation hole between these two segments, however it’s conscious that adjustments in core product choices like these can backfire.

“Anytime you’re asking people to change their behavior, that can be difficult. That’s why we’re really trying to be thoughtful about it. I think one of the most frustrating things from a user experience perspective is that the UI and navigation for Spotlight is different than the UI and navigation for Stories,” Spiegel mentioned in a name with analysts.

“The initial steps here are really trying to unify the UI and then unify the navigation and make sure there aren’t any, you know, negative secondary impacts on various parts of our business.”

It’s all about cash

Snap’s efforts to merge Tales and Highlight expertise additionally must do with the truth that the social community is making an attempt to supply higher incentives to advertisers. Through the earnings name, Spiegel boasted about the truth that Highlight has about 99% brand-safe content material, based on a third-party audit estimate.

“I think one of the really unique things about Snapchat is that advertisers can get a brand-safe experience without paying a premium for it like they have to do on other platforms to avoid harmful content,” he famous.

“I do think we’ll be able to continue to extend those benefits to advertisers in this unified experience, and our very high levels of brand safety, I think, are a real differentiator for us.”

The corporate additionally mentioned that it plans to deploy insights from My AI utilization to extra “relevant and engaging advertising” to customers.

In Could 2023, Snap introduced new ad products for each Tales and Highlight together with sponsored hyperlink function for My AI.

Moreover, Spiegel mentioned that the corporate centered on evolving the Android app for the previous few years to get development in rising markets. Nevertheless, now it is able to ramp up improvement on iOS entrance to draw extra engagement from extra “monetizable” areas similar to North America and Europe.

The corporate has additionally began taking price reducing mesaures already. Earlier this month, the corporate laid off 10% of the worforce (impacting greater than 500 folks) to cut back “a number of layers of management.”

“In order to best position our business to execute on our highest priorities, and to ensure we have the capacity to invest incrementally to support our growth over time, we have made the difficult decision to restructure our team,” the corporate mentioned in an SEC filing.