Report: Snap Eyes 20% Cut in 6,500 Staff

Snap will lay off around 20% of its workforce, Bloomberg wrote.

This comes out of their almost 6,500 employees, and the job cuts will start Wednesday (Aug. 31) after several weeks of planning, with the team working on Minis, followed by Zenly, the company Snap bought to help with social mapping.

Minis are small apps made by third parties running in the Snapchat main app.

Snap didn’t reply to a request for comment from PYMNTS.

The company’s shares fell upon the news, and its stock has been down 79% overall this year, with ad spending slowing down.

Because of uncertainty, Snap had told investors that it couldn’t offer any guidance for the current quarter. The company said its focus will be on growing the user base, improving direct-response ads and how it measures ad spending, and finding new revenue sources.

Snap has been doing well in some regards, though, with its Snapchat+ subscription service seeing over 1 million sign-ups in August since it launched not long before that.

Read more: Snapchat+ Adds 1M+ Subscribers in First 6 Weeks

PYMNTS wrote that the service would also be rolling out four features to enhance the user experience. Among those are Priority Story Replies, which will make subscriber replies more visible to Snap Stars, and Post View Emoji, letting users add emojis for friends to see after viewing their Snaps. There will be other features letting people access new app icons and backgrounds for bitmojis.

Snapchat members can set up the Snapchat+ service any time, which costs $3.99 per month and will likely add more features in the next few months.

It came as Snap had recorded its weakest-ever quarterly sales growth, reflecting how dire things have been for companies in digital advertising. Evan Spiegel, the CEO, said those results didn’t reflect the company’s ambitions.

“We are evolving our business and strategy to reaccelerate revenue growth, including innovating on our products, investing heavily in our direct response advertising business, and cultivating new sources of revenue to help diversify our top-line growth,” he said at the time.