Snapchat has announced that it has paid more than $ 250 million to more than 12,000 creators this year on Spotlight, its TikTok clone. Since the launch of Spotlight last year, Snapchat claims creators post three times as often.
This is not a novelty for anyone, as soon as a new feature or a new social network emerges, the competition rushes to take over the codes in order to stay at the heart of the trends. With Spotlight, Snapchat uses the format of the short and viral videos that made TikTok so successful, a format also taken up by Instagram with its Reels and Youtube with Shorts. But copying a feature is not everything, it remains to convince its users to make it their own. And it is now with millions of dollars that the battle is raging to attract creators to use them.
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Snapchat announcement thus, on the occasion of the first year of its service, having paid in 2021 over $ 250 million to over 12,000 creators as part of its Snapchat Spotlight programs. A dizzying figure but which remains below what should have been paid. When it first launched its feature in November 2020, the company said it would pay out more than $ 1 million per day in total to Spotlight contributors with top performing videos – $ 365 million. if she had kept this pace. An amount that was however reduced according to its CEO Evan Spiegel, because the platform was paying for too much copied content.
In order to encourage creators to offer unique content, Snapchat has therefore endeavored to offer dedicated tools such as Story Studio, an editing application for the mobile, or its famous augmented reality lenses. Snapchat claims that the creators of Spotlight post to the section three times more often than when it launched a year ago. Now 65% of Spotlight submissions use a Snapchat creative tool, like the lens Cartoon Style 3D, which uses machine learning to turn people into a 3D cartoon in real time, and which generated 2.8 billion impressions in its first week on the app.
The monetization of content is also another axis on which the platform is working a lot. ” Short-lived content and video is a very competitive space right now Sam Corrao Clanon, content director who leads the Snapchat Spotlight team and formerly responsible for content strategy and insights at TikTok, told magazine Variety. ” For us the challenge was how to do something distinct and complementary in terms of value “. Creators can take advantage of Spotlight through user donations in the app, Digital Gifting which allows users to buy responses to stories from their favorite Snapchat influencers, or the Creator Marketplace, the marketplace that makes it easier for brands to collaborate with developers and influencers around augmented reality. Other initiatives have also taken place to compensate creators like the Challenges Accepted launched last October which offers users the chance to win cash prizes ($ 25,000 or more) for creating the best Spotlight Snaps using lenses, specific sounds or topics. The company currently organizes 3 to 5 challenges per week.
Snapchat also brought in top Spotlight creators to develop shows for airing on Snapchat Discover. The company licensed Discover shows from 25 of them, giving them a new format and distribution channel, higher production values and a share of advertising revenue.
However, Snapchat has yet to prove that it can turn Spotlight into a meaningful business. The platform first focused on providing income to creators before considering directly monetizing Spotlight content. For now, the company is testing interstitial ads in the while section ” now the experience Said Corrao Clanon.