Spotlight, Snapchat's answer to TikTok, has already reached 100 million users. The short-form video feature was launched in November 2020 and is quickly picking up speed.
Spotlight's Rapid Growth Credited to Financial Incentive
Snap made its 2020 fourth-quarter earnings report public in a post on its Snap Investor Relations site. The company revealed that Spotlight garnered over 100 million active users. Spotlight showcases a feed of user-created clips, which Snapchat tailors according to your viewing activity.
Spotlight's growing popularity likely has something to do with Snapchat's incentive that drives users to create quality content. Every day, the platform splits $1 million between the creators with the most popular clips. In a Tweet from January 2021, Snapchat stated that over 2,000 Snapchatters have already earned a piece of $42 million since Spotlight's launch.
On a call with investors, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel noted, "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."
Despite this, it's still unclear whether this incentive is here to stay. Snap CFO Derek Andersen stated, "while it is still very early in the development of this new content platform, we are highly encouraged by the initial results and excited about the potential for Spotlight to further expand our monetization opportunity in the future."
How Does Spotlight Stack Up to TikTok?
Spotlight has a lot of room to grow, as it's relatively underdeveloped when compared to TikTok. For example, Spotlight's search feature isn't as in-depth as TikTok's, making it harder to discover new content.
Features aside, Spotlight's number of monthly users still lags behind TikTok by a significant margin. TikTok sits at about 100 million monthly users in the US, and nearly 700 million monthly users worldwide.
These numbers were released in a report by CNBC in August 2020, which means that the app's userbase has likely increased since then. That said, TikTok is still far ahead of Spotlight in the short-form video race—at least for now.
Snapchat's report also shows that its overall daily active users have spiked from 249 million in quarter three of 2020 to 265 million in quarter four, a clear sign that the app is growing.
The Future of Social Media Monetization
It seems that all social media networks are figuring out what drives quality content to their platform: money. When a platform's top creators are paid, they'll keep pushing out entertaining content, driving more people to the platform.
Snapchat isn't the only platform waving money at its users. TikTok has also started dabbling in the idea of monetization. In a 2020 post on the TikTok Newsroom, the platform announced a $200 million creator fund that qualified creators can earn a part of.