Spotlight is similar to TikTok but on Snapchat creators get paid to make content. Snap said it will pay $1 million per day to creators for more than a month so that they keep posting videos. Around 175,000 videos are uploaded on Spotlight per day, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in the earnings call.
The payments have generated significant interest in the feature among users. Last month, The New York Times reported that some of the most successful Spotlight creators — some of whom are still teens — have made millions of dollars from viral clips.
Snapchat faced increased competition for Gen Z users from the popular ByteDance-owned app.
“Our primary goal in launching Spotlight was to build critical mass both in terms of video submissions and audience in a select set of countries so that we could begin to rapidly iterate on content ranking and the overall product experience. We are seeing over 175,000 video submissions per day, on average, in part due to our incentive program for creators, where we distribute over $1 million per day to the top performing videos,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said.
“Our product and ranking teams have been able to quickly improve our ability to match Spotlight viewers with the right content, and we are now working on a broader rollout of Spotlight to our entire community,” he added.
Spotlight is available in 11 countries including the US, UK, France, Germany and Australia. Creators can make up to 60-second long Snap videos and post them to Spotlight. The interface is similar to TikTok but there are no public comments. Top creators with the highest number of Spotlight views can earn up to $1 million per day. Snapchat also plans to bring ads to Spotlight later.
Snapchat is regularly used to share private messages with friends and family. The company said that Snapchatters opened the app an average of 30 times per day on average during the fourth quarter.
The app has also become a destination for media and entertainment programming on its Discover page. According to the company, over 90 percent of Gen Z Americans watched shows and publisher content via Discover during the quarter. Users over 35, meanwhile, increased their daily time spent engaging with that programming on the platform by more than 30 percent.
Snapchat is also continuing to grow outside of Spotlight. The app added 15 million new users last quarter, bringing its total daily active users up to 265 million. The company reported $911 million in revenue for the quarter, a 62 percent increase from last year. At the same time, the company also cautioned that Apple’s upcoming iOS 14 update, which requires apps to ask for users’ permission for ad tracking features, could present a “risk” to the company.