Snapchat admits that it needs—gasp—more users older than 34
During Snap’s Q3 earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Evan Spiegel revealed that Snapchat is being redesigned to address concerns that the app is “difficult to understand” and “hard to use.” (Perhaps you’ve heard that before?)
Here’s what Spiegel said:
“[W]e are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use. There is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application.”
In other words, Snap is about to lose even more money. Spiegel also said Snap now reaches over 70% of the 13- to 34 year-old population in the United States, France, the U.K., and Australia, but conceded that it needs more older users if it wants to grow. “In order to further scale our user base, we need to accelerate the adoption of our product among Android users, users above the age of 34, and users in the Rest of World markets,” he said.
The redesign, Spiegel said, will improve content discovery through what sounds a lot like an algorithmic news feed. “[W]e are going to make it easier to discover the vast quantity of content on our platform that goes undiscovered or unseen every day,” he said. Spiegel continued:
“We think that there is a big opportunity to surface some of this content in a personalized and more relevant way, while still maintaining the exploratory nature of our service. We are developing a new solution that provides each of our 178 million Daily Active Users with their own Stories experience, leveraging the tremendous benefits of machine learning without compromising the editorial integrity of the Stories platform that we have worked so hard to build.”
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