On Thursday, Bloomberg first reported that Snapchat Inc. is laying off about 100 employees. Aggressive hiring over the last few years is their latest step to restructure the company. This time the lay-off is focused on the advertising side of the business after trimming 120 engineering staff in March and 22 content staff in January.
This is the third round of layoffs for Snap in a year that’s only three months old. `Late last year, we asked senior leaders across Snap to look closely at their teams to ensure they had the right resources and organizations to support their missions,” Imran Khan, Snap’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement.
But Snap’s recent moves to cut staff from several departments aren’t completely surprising; the rolling cuts are a part of a response to over-hiring as Snap scrambled to build an advertising business and release new products.
Cuts in the advertising department, in part, align with Snapchat’s push to sell ads more programmatically rather than through direct sales. Taking the last quarter, 90 percent of Snap Ads were served programmatically, 10 percent more than the previous quarter, and the move to programmatic has helped Snapchat’s revenue growth.
Though Snapchat has reported better earnings for the final quarter of 2017, competitors in social networks like Facebook and Instagram still far exceed Snapchat in overall user numbers and in revenue, even with the #deletefacebook movement. It had 3,069 employees during its last quarterly earnings report. The updated number of employees is yet to know.
