Snapchat Spotlight Has Already Amassed 100 Million Users

Snap has made a big bet on user-generated video, doling out $1 million a day since December to top creators trying their hand at Spotlight, the company’s new TikTok rival. That $1 million a day was supposed to expire after the new year, but the company kept it going. Something must’ve gone right. In its latest earnings report, Snap announced record user base numbers—265 million daily active users in the final quarter of 2020—but also revealed that Spotlight alone saw 100 million users in January. “We’ve long watched as some of the best Snaps go viral on other platforms, and wished to provide a way for Snaps to reach a large audience on Snapchat, but we struggled to accomplish that in a way that aligns with our values,” Snap founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said in his prepared remarks. Spiegel added that the company is seeing an average of 175,000 videos posted per day to Spotlight. While Spotlight is still unmonetized for now, it’s easy to see how in-feed ads can work with the product. Snap CFO Derek Andersen said the company is “highly encouraged by the initial results and excited about the potential for Spotlight to further expand our monetization opportunity in the future.” Spotlight has raised some eyebrows across the industry for its massive paydays to select creators in the early days of its experiment—a few have even won checks worth millions of dollars. Andersen said the Spotlight, which added $40 million to the company’s cost of revenue in the quarter, will continue paying out $1 million per day to creators. While Snap posted impressive gains in user base and its revenue rose 62% to $911 million in Q4, the company’s stock price fell in-after hours trading. The dip was largely attributed to a lower-than-expected Q1 forecast and changes to Apple’s mobile privacy standards. “We anticipate that the iOS platform policy changes to be implemented later this quarter will present another risk of interruption to demand in the period immediately after they are implemented,” Andersen wrote in his prepared remarks, noting that the full effects of the changes won’t be clear until “several months or more after the changes are implemented.” Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer analyst at Insider Intelligence, said she is “enthused” about Snap’s growth, and its success with Spotlight. “It's notable that Snap's take on TikTok-style videos, Snapchat Spotlight, has already grown to 100 million monthly active users even though it's just a couple months old,” Williamson said. “That indicates that there is more demand for this type of content even outside of TikTok."

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Snapchat Spotlight Has Already Amassed 100 Million Users

The TikTok-like feature has been doling out $1 million a day to creators

Scott Nover

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