Snapchat's controversial redesign, introduced last November, caused it to lose millions of subscribers according to data shared today in its second quarter earnings results.
Snap said it had 188 million daily active Snapchat users during the second quarter of 2018, down from 191 million during the first quarter of the year.
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In prepared remarks [PDF] on Snapchat's performance, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said that the two percent decline in daily active users was "primarily driven" by a lower frequency of use among the company's user base due to "the disruption caused by our redesign."
Spiegel said that Snapchat is working to iterate and improve the app based on community feedback, and he says that the major frustrations have been addressed.
While our Monthly Active Users continued to grow this quarter, we saw a 2 percent decline in our Daily Active Users. This was primarily driven by a slightly lower frequency of use among our user base due to the disruption caused by our redesign.
It has been approximately six months since we broadly rolled out the redesign of our application, and we have been working hard to iterate and improve Snapchat based on the feedback from our community. We feel that we have now addressed the biggest frustrations we've heard and are eager to make more progress on the tremendous opportunity we now have to show more of the right content to the right people.
Following the release of the redesigned app, more than 1.2 million users signed a petition asking for the change to be reversed.
In response, Snap rolled back some of the design changes, reverting Snaps and Chats back to chronological order and re-adding Stories from friends to the right side of the app. Snap also reintroduced the feature that allowed it to open up in camera mode, and users can again swipe left to view posts from friends.
The redesign of the app was initially aimed at appealing to a broader demographic and expanding Snapchat's user base, but Snapchat users were not prepared for the drastic change and did not become accustomed to the redesign as Snap had hoped.
Despite the fact that it's number of daily active users dropped, Snapchat brought in $262 million in revenue, an increase of 44 percent year-over-year.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Very irritating
PITA
In my opinion social media, especially Snapchat, has ruined society.
It is addictive poison. I’m so tired and bored of it all at this point. I’m tired of scrolling and tapping and scrolling and tapping through crap that I deep down don’t really care about. I used to love Snapchat and I didn’t stop using it because of the update, I just really can’t be bothered with it anymore, same with Instagram. I have no idea how people post multiple selfies every day 364 days a year amongst other crap. I used to post some myself but then realised how weird, pointless, and ridiculous it is. It makes you become so self absorbed, then again it does tend to attract narcissists the most but it only increases narcissistic behaviour in general. Many people post multiple stories to both their Snapchat and Instagram. Every. Damn. Day. It is pure madness and yet people don’t realise it and are perfectly okay with constantly doing it. Once you take a big step back away from it all though and see it from a birds eye point of view you soon realise how nuts it all is.I also realised that I just kept seeing slightly different variations of the same s*** every single day. I don’t think many people realise that is exactly what they are doing because they are so consumed by it all. You could go cold turkey for a month and when you go back you haven’t missed anything that you haven’t already seen many times before really. It also wasn’t making me feel good seeing everyone with these supposed ‘perfect’ lives, it was making me anxious and miserable constantly comparing myself to others. I haven’t comlpletely quit it yet but I already feel better now that I’m not checking it as much.