LOS ANGELES, Calif. – An estimate of two dozen employees from eight different teams working for Snap Inc. were laid off on Thursday. Most of the laid off employees were from the content division of the company, including editors working on reviewing user-submitted videos to be displayed on breaking news section of the app. Other cuts also came from the partnering teams and engineering department.
The role of the company’s content division is to be responsible for working with Snap’s publishing partners, such as NBC and BuzzFeed, to provide original video content for the app. A group of humans handle this task, especially for reviewing user-submitted posts, to make sure that all of their content is legit and to look out for fake news.
On the other hand, a number of employees situated in London and New York were also requested to move to the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles. According to Cheddar, the employee cuts are already confirmed. However, the spokesperson declined to respond further regarding the issue.
The announcement of the layoffs came from the company’s CEO Evan Spiegel’s company-wide memo delivered this week. The note also elaborated on the significance of building and operating a “scalable” business. He explained that Snap needs to have an organization that scales internally. He also added the importance of becoming exponentially more productive. The CEO’s recent memo tackles the issue of “Size vs. Scale” as it explains the difference of getting bigger and gaining leverage.
It can be recalled that this is not the first incident for this company to lay off employees. Last September, an estimate of a dozen members from its hardware division was cut. In addition, 18 recruiters last October are also removed from the list as the company plans to take hiring slowly in 2018.
There are theories circulating that the layoffs are related to redesigning Snapchat. It was announced in November that the company is having attempts to revive its stagnant user growth by employing a particular redesigning update. The Snapchat update is expected to make the application less perplexing for its users. The strategy is said to be divvying the section related to friend-based communication from posts of publishers. The update also plans to incorporate a news feed similar to Facebook for their video content.
The company planned to share the redesigned app to its users in the first week of December. However, the initial plan became a blur as Snap has been slow to grant availability of the update outside a number of countries such as Canada and Australia. The new target is to make the redesign available to all of its users by the end of the first quarter this year.
Snap Inc. is a well-known American social media and technology company, founded by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy on September 2011. The company is based in Venice, Los Angeles, and was originally known as Snapchat Inc. However, to cover all their four hit products, namely, Snapchat, Bitmoji, Zenly, and Spectacles, under a single company, its name is rebranded to its current title in 2016.
