Snapchat Stock Price Falls, Users Unhappy With Redesign

Snapchat’s already underperforming stock price took a hit Tuesday when the markets opened after the app suffered a great deal of dismay from users over its redesigned layout introduced late last week.

Snapchat, listed on the New York Stock Exchange as SNAP, dropped nearly five percent Tuesday in what appears to be a reaction to users recoiling at the limited release of the app’s latest redesign intended to increase engagement.

After starting the day valued at $14.10, Snapchat’s stock steadily dropped to $13.54 within just the first half-hour of trading. The stock stabilized around that range, but at one point hit a low of $13.44.

The drop is bad news for Snapchat, which has experienced few highs and plenty of lows since going public last year. Originally valued at about $24 per share, the social app has tanked ever since, regularly missing on its quarterly earnings and growth expectations.

While Snapchat has struggled to grow its app, its existing user base has remained loyal to the service—even as competitors like Facebook and Instagram have encroached on its territory and copied popular features.

A recent report of internal metrics from Snapchat published by the Daily Beast revealed the app’s users spent about 34.5 minutes per day in the app, which amounts to slightly more engagement than the 32 minutes per day that Instagram claims to generate from its users.

Unfortunately for Snapchat, it seems to have managed to irritate those loyal users with its most recent redesign.

For months, the company has been promising tweaks to the app that are intended to encourage users to engage with Stories from publishers and advertisers. That redesign arrived for users United Kingdom, Australia and Canada last week and the response was nothing short of disastrous.

Users almost universally dismissed the update, taking to just about every social media platform other than Snapchat to complain about it.

Chief among the complaints from users is the decision to move Stories—publicly available content that can be viewed by a users’ friends for 24 hours—into the inbox where direct messages are sent and received. The app’s “Discover” page, where stories once lived, has also received an update that users have found difficult to navigate.

Since the app update has rolled out to users, Snapchat has been showered with bad reviews. Mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower reportedly found that 83 percent of reviews for Snapchat in the iTunes App Store were negative and offered a one or two star score. Just 17 percent offered three stars or higher.

The response required Snapchat to issue a statement informing users that “it’s not possible to revert to a previous version of Snapchat.”