On the 21st of February 2018, Kylie Jenner dropped a damaging tweet that caused a big damage to Snapchat. She tweeted. “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore ? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad.” Instantly, the company lost $1.3 billion in market value and it’s share dropped 6%. Not only that, the tweet went viral and bloggers had a field day launching more embarrassing attack on the company. Kylie Jenner used to be the queen of Snapchat but one tweet from her killed the company.
That is just a tip of the company’s long list of troubles. After the CEO of Snapchat Evan Speigel turned down a second offer from Mark Zuckerberg to sell the company in 2016, it looked like he made the right decision. Snapchat’s parent company Snap went public in March 2017 with a valuation of $24 billion.
After that, Mark Zuckerberg started copying some of Snapchat features an bringing them into Facebook. That move made Facebook a big threat and competitor to Snapchat. Ever since, Snapchat’s daily user seems to be on a steady decline and the company’s value as of December 2018 is less than $5 billion.
Adding insult to injury, Snapchat redesigned the user interface. A move that greatly angered it’s shrinking user base to the extent 1.2 million users signed a petition in protest. The users called the new design “annoying” and asked that the company goes back to it’s former design.
“The whole thing is an absolute mess ! People are not using Snapchat anymore and on top of that you’re getting a public celebrity backlash.” Says Scott Levy, CEO of social media company Fuel online. Instagram stories, which function exactly like Snapchat is attracting hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
“A lot of my friends are saying they’re going to delete it. The new design is so ugly and difficult to understand,” said Claire Patcher, a 16 year old student. It’s so obvious that the company did not do their homework properly. They are fast losing relevance in the industry and newer apps like TikTok are fast taking over. No one knows how the company plans to recover from this mess but one thing is certain. They should have sold the company when they had the chance. The year 2019 doesn’t look to bright for the company as Snapchat said in a statement. “The new design is here to stay.”
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