Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, is laying off two dozen employees, a company spokesperson told TheWrap.
Roughly five to ten of the workers losing their jobs are on the content team, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. The layoffs are part of a realignment on the content team, TheWrap has learned, and the company plans to continue hiring more workers as it focuses on shows, growth and augmented reality in 2018.
The Information and Cheddar were the first outlets to report the cuts.
The layoffs don’t impact the editors Snapchat leans on to program its Discover channels, which house its shows and publisher content. Snap vice president of content Nick Bell recently hired several senior managers as the company looks to add original scripted programming to its slate — something Bell said is “imminent” on Monday.
After the layoffs, Snap is aiming to centralize its content team at its Los Angeles headquarters.
In a memo sent earlier this week and obtained by Cheddar, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said “having a scalable business model isn’t enough.” He added: “We also need to have an organization that scales internally. This means that we must become exponentially more productive as we add additional resources and team members.”
After a rocky first year since going public, Spiegel announced in November its trailblazing app would undergo a redesign. The move aims to make Snapchat “easier to use,” as Spiegel put it. While the updated Snapchat has been tested in smaller markets, it hasn’t been rolled out to its 180 million users across the globe.