Apps

Snap is looking to unify user experience across Spotlight and Stories

Comment

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 31: Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 31, 2024 in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony from the heads of the largest tech firms on the dangers of child sexual exploitation on social media. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Image Credits: Alex Wong / Getty Images

Snap’s stock plunged 30% on Tuesday after announcing Q4 2023 results that didn’t meet analyst expectations. On the earnings call, CEO Evan Spiegel said the company is taking a few steps this year to fuel growth. These include unifying experience across Stories and Spotlight, improving ad interactions across platforms and increasing engagement and user growth in North America and Europe.

The social network launched its TikTok-rival Spotlight over three years ago and it has seen promising results. Total time spent watching Spotlight increased 175% year-on-year and average monthly active users grew 35% year-on-year, according to the company’s Q4 2023 earnings release.

Spiegel said that the company wants to leverage things like ranking mechanisms and recommendation engines from Spotlight and port to Stories for better engagement. The company wants to start with merging the interface and navigation gap between these two segments, but it is aware that changes in core product offerings like these can backfire.

“Anytime you’re asking people to change their behavior, that can be difficult. That’s why we’re really trying to be thoughtful about it. I think one of the most frustrating things from a user experience perspective is that the UI and navigation for Spotlight is different than the UI and navigation for Stories,” Spiegel said in a call with analysts.

“The initial steps here are really trying to unify the UI and then unify the navigation and make sure there aren’t any, you know, negative secondary impacts on various parts of our business.”

It’s all about money

Snap’s efforts to merge Stories and Spotlight experience also have to do with the fact that the social network is trying to offer better incentives to advertisers. During the earnings call, Spiegel boasted about the fact that Spotlight has about 99% brand-safe content, according to a third-party audit estimate.

“I think one of the really unique things about Snapchat is that advertisers can get a brand-safe experience without paying a premium for it like they have to do on other platforms to avoid harmful content,” he noted.

“I do think we’ll be able to continue to extend those benefits to advertisers in this unified experience, and our very high levels of brand safety, I think, are a real differentiator for us.”

The company also said that it plans to deploy insights from My AI usage to more “relevant and engaging advertising” to users.

In May 2023, Snap announced new ad products for both Stories and Spotlight along with a sponsored link feature for My AI.

Additionally, Spiegel said that the company focused on evolving the Android app for the past few years to get growth in emerging markets. However, now it is ready to ramp up development on the iOS front to attract more engagement from more “monetizable” regions such as North America and Europe.

The company has also started taking cost-cutting measures already. Earlier this month, the company laid off 10% of the workforce (impacting more than 500 people) to reduce “a number of layers of management.”

“In order to best position our business to execute on our highest priorities, and to ensure we have the capacity to invest incrementally to support our growth over time, we have made the difficult decision to restructure our team,” the company said in an SEC filing.

More TechCrunch

Users will be able to get the first taste of Apple Intelligence as Apple has started to make some of the features of its AI suite available with the iOS…

Apple brings Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 dev beta, but there are a lot of limitations

Canva has acquired Leonardo.ai, a generative AI content and research startup, as the company looks to deepen its investments in its AI tech stack. The financial terms of the deal…

Canva acquires Leonardo.ai to boost its generative AI efforts

The U.S. Commerce Department today issued a report in support of “open-weight” generative AI models like Meta’s Llama 3.1, but recommended the government develop “new capabilities” to monitor these models…

U.S. Commerce Department report endorses ‘open’ AI models

Shared micromobility giant Lime is piloting two new vehicles designed to appeal to women and older folks who might appreciate a lower step-through frame, smaller wheels and an upgrade from…

Lime is piloting two new e-bikes to attract more women and older riders 

Apple has published a technical paper detailing the models that it developed to power Apple Intelligence, the range of generative AI features headed to iOS, macOS and iPadOS over the…

Apple says it took a ‘responsible’ approach to training its Apple Intelligence models

A fireside chat on Monday between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference in Colorado took a few unexpected turns. It started innocently…

Huang and Zuckerberg swapped jackets at SIGGRAPH 2024 and things got weird

Meta’s machine learning model, Segment Anything, has a sequel: It now takes the model to the video domain, showing how fast the field is moving.

Zuckerberg touts Meta’s latest video vision AI with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Featured Article

The fall of EV startup Fisker: A comprehensive timeline

Here is a timeline of the events that led fledgling automaker Fisker to file for bankruptcy.

The fall of EV startup Fisker: A comprehensive timeline

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. In case you missed it, Boeing and NASA decided to keep Starliner docked to the International Space Station for the rest of the…

TechCrunch Space: Catching stars

As failed EV startup Fisker winds its way through bankruptcy, a persistent and tricky question has become a flashpoint of the proceedings: does its only secured lender, Heights Capital Management,…

The question haunting Fisker’s bankruptcy

So-called “unlearning” techniques are used to make a generative AI model forget specific and undesirable info it picked up from training data, like sensitive private data or copyrighted material. But…

Making AI models ‘forget’ undesirable data hurts their performance

Uber is now letting riders in India book up to three rides simultaneously.

Uber now lets users in India book three trips at once

U.S. airports are rolling out facial recognition to scan travelers’ faces before boarding their flights. Americans, at least, can opt out. 

How to opt out of facial recognition at airports (if you’re American)

The promise of AI and large language models (LLMs) is the ability to understand increasingly wider amounts of context and make sense of that information easily, so it makes sense…

Bee AI raises $7M for its wearable AI assistant that learns from your conversations

Featured Article

DEI backlash: Stay up-to-date on the latest legal and corporate challenges

It’s clear that this year will be a turning point for DEI.

DEI backlash: Stay up-to-date on the latest legal and corporate challenges

Bike-taxi startup Rapido, which counts Swiggy among its investors, is the latest Indian firm to become a unicorn.

India’s Rapido becomes a unicorn with fresh $120M funding

Government websites aren’t known for cutting-edge tech. GovWell co-founder and CTO Ben Cohen discovered this while trying to help his dad, a contractor, apply for building permits. Cohen worked as…

GovWell is bringing automation and efficiency to local governments

Critics have long argued that wararantless device searches at the U.S. border are unconstitutional and violate the Fourth Amendment.

US border agents must get warrant before cell phone searches, federal court rules

Featured Article

UK’s Zapp EV plans to expand globally with an early start in India

Zapp is launching its urban electric two-wheeler in India in 2025 as it plans to expand globally.

UK’s Zapp EV plans to expand globally with an early start in India

The first time I saw Google’s latest commercial, I wondered, “Is it just me, or is this kind of bad?” By the fourth or fifth time I saw it, I’d…

Dear Google, who wants an AI-written fan letter?

Featured Article

MatPat, the first big YouTuber to successfully exit his company, is lobbying for creators on Capitol Hill

Though MatPat retired from YouTube, he’s still pretty busy. In fact, he’s been spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill.

MatPat, the first big YouTuber to successfully exit his company, is lobbying for creators on Capitol Hill

Featured Article

A tale of two foldables

Samsung is still foldables’ 500-pound gorilla, but the company successes have made the category significantly less lonely in recent years.

A tale of two foldables

The California Department of Motor Vehicles this week granted Nuro approval to test its third-generation R3 autonomous delivery vehicle in four Bay Area cities, giving the AV startup a positive…

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro is gearing up for a comeback

With Ghostery turning 15 years old this month, TechCrunch caught up with CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz to discuss the company’s strategy and the state of ad tracking.

Ghostery’s CEO says regulation won’t save us from ad trackers

Two years ago, workers at an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland, were the first to establish a formally recognized union at an Apple retail store in the United States. Now…

Apple reaches its first contract agreement with a US retail union

OpenAI is testing SearchGPT, a new AI search experience to compete directly with Google. The feature aims to elevate search queries with “timely answers” from across the internet and allows…

OpenAI comes for Google with SearchGPT

Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX announced on Saturday a controversial plan to “socialize” the $230 million loss from its recent security breach among all its customers, a move that has sent…

WazirX to ‘socialize’ $230M security breach loss among customers

Featured Article

Stay up-to-date on the amount of venture dollars going to underrepresented founders

Stay up-to-date on the latest funding news for Black and women founders.

Stay up-to-date on the amount of venture dollars going to underrepresented founders

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, companies and the broader public, has re-released a…

NIST releases a tool for testing AI model risk

Featured Article

Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026

Max Space’s expandable habitats promise to be larger, stronger, and more versatile than anything like them ever launched, not to mention cheaper and lighter by far than a solid, machined structure.

Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026