Music Notes

Rihanna blast drops Snap's market value by hundreds of millions of dollars

by Charlie Smith on March 16th, 2018 at 9:09 PM
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      It's been a rough week for Snapchat after a monumental public-relations blunder.

      It started when the social-media app posted an ad asking people if they would rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown.

      It was a tasteless reference to Brown's beating of Rihanna a few years back for which he was convicted of assault.

      It immediately led to calls to delete the app.

      Naturally, the publicly traded owner of the app, Snap Inc., issued an apology, maintaining that the message was "approved in error, as it violates our advertising guidelines".

      But Rihanna wasn't buying that.

      She went on Instagram to say a joke was made out of "something that would intentionally bring shame to DV victims".

      "Shame on you," Rihanna declared to her 60.9 million followers. "Throw the whole app-oligy away."

      That led to her fans dumping the Snapchat app, which drove down the share price of Snap.

      Today, it was off 1.10 percent, closing at US$17.01. That's down from US$18.11 on Monday, wiping out hundreds of millions in market value.

      Last month, Snapchat shares also took a dive when Kylie Jenner claimed that the social-media app was dead.

      That dragged the share price down to US$17.45 on February 22.

      Reuters reported that Jenner's outburst resulted in a US$1.5-billion loss in market value.

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