It looks like Hollywood celeb disses of Snapchat are still swaying investors’ thinking — to some extent — about the prospects of the app’s parent company.
Chrissy Teigen on Saturday tweeted that she’s dropping Snapchat, citing a recent ad featuring Rihanna that made light of domestic violence and the social messaging and media app’s widely maligned redesign.
On Monday Snap shares opened up 0.6 percent, at $16.44 per share. However, the stock quickly turned, falling as much as 1.5 percent. Snap was trending down 0.5 percent in morning trading, amid an uptick in broader markets. It’s a sign that the user backlash against Snapchat has not yet been fully “baked in” to the stock price by investors.
“The update, the constant complaints of people not being able to find me, plus the Rihanna poll…no bueno,” Teigen wrote in jumping on the Snapchat-hater bandwagon.
The move to boycott Snapchat by Teigen, the outspoken model who’s married to John Legend, comes a little over a week after Rihanna slammed the company for the ad (a poll asking users whether they’d rather “slap Rihanna” or “punch Chris Brown”). Shares closed down 3.6 percent on March 15 after the Snap flap.
And last month, the Kardashian clan’s Kylie Jenner tweeted her complaints about Snapchat’s new redesign (“does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me…”), which contributed to Snap stock dropping as much as 8 percent.
Snap has tried to reassure users that usability of the new Snapchat app will improve over time the more they use it, and has promised tweaks to the design. One of the main gripes is that Snapchat Stories for individual users no longer appear in the right-hand Discover section (which is dedicated solely to media-partner content).
Snap went public in a booming IPO a year ago but its stock drop dropped over the course of 2017 after reporting disappointing results. Shares rebounded after Snap posted better-than-expected earnings for Q4 2017, but the stock is still down more than 33 percent from a 52-week high of $24.40 per share.
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