Snapchat Lays Off More than 20 Employees, Relocates Content Team to LA

Social media company Snapchat has laid off two dozen of their employees and relocated some of their content team members from New York to Los Angeles.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Snap Inc., the parent company of popular social media app Snapchat, has let go approximately 22 employees, including members of the company’s content team as the company attempts to consolidate most of that team in Los Angeles where the company’s VP of Content Nick Bell is based. The content team is in charge of Snapchat users “stories” feed and the “discover” section of the app which features channels for many high profile brands and publications.

VP of Content Nick bell recruited News Corp. veteran Rahul Chopra to oversee a new Snapchat feature called “Stories Everywhere” late last year, while also recruiting former MiTu product chief, Mike Su to focus on all product development relating to content programs. Due to these new hires, Bell began reorganizing the responsibilities of many of his main management team, leading to the relocation of several New York-based content team members to Los Angeles. Despite the layoff of 22 employees, it’s expected that Bell will continue hiring employees to his content team as the team’s workload is ramped up following the announcement that Snapchat will be developing original stories.

The number of employees on Snapchat’s Spectacles team was also reduced and twenty positions were cut from the team, likely due to the poor public reception of the wearable Snapchat story recording glasses. In recent years, Snapchat has struggled to grow their userbase at the same rate that they had in earlier years, reporting 178 million active daily users in November of 2017, Snapchat also reported a loss of $179 million towards the end of the third quarter of 2017, all of which has lead to the company’s decision to slow down the hiring of new employees in 2018.

Evan Spiegel, the company’s CEO, stated last year that a redesign of the Snapchat app will be published sometime in 2018 in an attempt to attract more users. The main difference between the current design and the new design is that publisher produced content and user-produced content will be separated, making for a cleaner and easier to operate user interface.