Snap reported a decline in its daily active user base following a widely criticised redesign of its Snapchat app, as CEO Evan Spiegel said the company had addressed the most irritating elements.

While the Q2 daily active user figure of 188 million was up 8 per cent year-on-year, it was down from 191 million in Q1. The CEO said this was mostly due to declines in the frequency of use “due to the disruption caused by our redesign”.

“It has been approximately six months since we broadly rolled out the redesign of our application, and we have been working hard to iterate and improve Snapchat based on the feedback from our community.

“We’re working hard to expand the long tail of our content offering and we are making steady progress on improving personalisation,” Speigel said.

The company partially revoked the changes in May.

Figures
Users continue to spend an average of more than 30 minutes on Snapchat every day and other indicators including new user retention are also showing positives.

In Q2 the company trimmed its loss to $353.3 million from $443.1 million in Q2 2017, on revenue of $262.3 million, up 44 per cent year-on-year.

Spiegel said its transition to programmatic advertising reduced cost per impression, swipe and install for advertisers “while simultaneously growing our advertising revenue 48 per cent year-over-year”.

“Our advertising is now cost-effective, easy to buy, and easy to measure. This has removed friction from our advertising business and allowed us to scale to many more advertisers than we could have reached with our direct sales force. Even though this transition wasn’t easy, it was the right thing to do for our business over the long-term, even at the expense of short-term revenue growth.”

It was also revealed Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding had a $250 million stake in Snap: the investment company previously invested in Twitter, Lyft and JD.com, among others, Financial Times reported.