Snap stock fell 30% on Tuesday after the company announced fourth-quarter 2023 results that fell short of analysts' expectations. CEO Evan Spiegel said on the earnings call that the company is taking several steps to accelerate growth this year. This includes a unified experience across Stories and Spotlight, improved ad interactions across platforms, increased engagement and user growth in North America and Europe, and more.
The social network launched TikTok rival Spotlight more than three years ago with promising results. According to the company's Q4 2023 financial results, Spotlight's total viewing time increased by 175% year-over-year, and the average number of monthly active users increased by 35% year-over-year.
Spiegel said the company wants to port things like Spotlight's ranking mechanism and recommendation engine to Stories to increase engagement. The company hopes to start by consolidating the interface and navigation gaps between the two segments, but recognizes that such core product changes could backfire. .
“When you ask people to change their behavior, it can be difficult to do that. That's why we try to think seriously about it. One of the most frustrating things from a user experience standpoint is that Spotlight “I think the UI and navigation is different than the UI and navigation of Stories,” Spiegel said on a call with analysts.
“The first step here is to actually unify the UI and then unify the navigation so that there's no secondary impact on different parts of the business.”
it's all about money
Snap's efforts to integrate the Stories and Spotlight experiences also play into the fact that the social network is looking to offer better incentives to advertisers. During the earnings call, Spiegel touted the fact that Spotlight has about 99% brand-safe content, according to third-party audit estimates.
“I think one of the things that's really unique about Snapchat is that advertisers can get a brand-safe experience without having to pay a premium to avoid harmful content on other platforms,” he said. Stated.
“I think we can continue to provide these benefits to advertisers with this unified experience. I think our very high level of brand safety will be a real differentiator for us.”
The company also said it plans to deploy insights from My AI usage into more “relevant and engaging ads” for users.
In May 2023, Snap announced new advertising products for both Stories and Spotlight, along with My AI's Sponsored Links feature.
Additionally, Spiegel said the company has focused on evolving its Android apps over the past few years to enable growth in emerging markets. But it is now ready to ramp up its iOS development to attract more involvement from more “monetizable” regions such as North America and Europe.
The company has already begun taking cost-cutting measures. Earlier this month, the company laid off 10% of its workforce (affecting more than 500 people) to reduce “multilayers of management.”
“We have made the difficult decision to restructure our team to best position our business to deliver on our top priorities and ensure our ability to make incremental investments to support long-term growth,” the company said in the SEC. I did,” he said. filing.