Snap announced today (December 14th, local time) that it paid more than $250 million to over 12,000 creators this year on its TikTok clone product Spotlight. Unlike the short messaging between Snapchat friends, Spotlight allows users to reach a wide audience. Snap said that since the launch of Spotlight last year, creators have posted three times more frequently.
The race for the dominance of short videos is underway, and this is already an open secret. As TikTok became one of the fastest apps to reach 1 billion monthly active users, competitors such as Snapchat Spotlight, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have also launched creator funds to incentivize people to produce content exclusively for their platforms.
Instagram Reels will not promote uploads with TikTok watermarks, and Snapchat has reduced its original daily salary of $1 million. The company’s CEO Evan Spiegel said in September that this was because it paid too much for “counterfeit content.” Even platforms like LinkedIn, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, and Twitter are experimenting with TikTok-like content.
Now, Snap claims that 65% of Spotlight submitted content uses Snapchat’s creative tools, such as augmented reality (AR) lenses – especially the cartoon-style 3D lenses that became popular this summer, which produced 28 in the first week of the application. Billion times related content.
In addition, Snap also caters to creators through its Story Studio, an independent application released at the Snap Partner Summit in May. Some creators use tools such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere to edit videos on their desktops and send them to mobile phones –but Snap tries to provide users with more flexibility.
Story Studio allows creators to perform more intensive editing on their mobile phones, and the web version of the Spotlight application allows users to upload their content without leaving the computer.
In addition, creators can also profit on Spotlight through in-app gifts and Snap’s creator market, which allows brands to more easily collaborate with AR developers and influencers. Creators can get a certain amount of income from gifts, but they can keep 100% of the income they get through the creator market.