Will Snapchat Spotlight Last Beyond Million-Dollar Payouts?

CJ OperAmericano became famous on Snapchat before that was really possible. She first started using the app in 2014, at age 17, to send handmade drawings to her older siblings. When her drawings became more intricate, she started posting some of them on her Instagram page, which caught a BuzzFeed contributor’s attention. Touting her as one of “15 Snapchat Enthusiasts That Will Inspire You To Take Better Snaps,” CJ started making a name for herself, bolstered by a gig running Disney Parks’ Snapchat account for its 60th anniversary and collaborations with more established creators on the platform. “I was just doodling with my siblings, and it turned into a full-time job,” she told Adweek recently. Without obvious mechanisms for growing an audience within the app, CJ built her subscriber base, now 153,000 strong, mainly through outside recognition and other platforms. Up until a few years ago, a flood of new connections could crash the app. “It was not made for a huge audience at all,” she said. “The first Snapchatters were definitely problem-solvers.” Now, at age 24, CJ is a full-time creator, combining comedy with art through drawing, singing and acting in skits. Like most professional content creators, she makes a living through branded content deals, leveraging her 855,000 TikTok followers and 36,000 Instagram followers, as well as her Snapchat audience. But it wasn’t until recently that Snapchat was really lucrative for CJ. In December, after posting a few short skits to Snapchat Spotlight, the company’s attempt to rival TikTok, CJ found out she had earned more than $100,000, which she called a “life-changing” amount of money. And she isn’t alone. A handful of creators have received seismic paydays since Spotlight debuted in late November—with some becoming overnight millionaires from the app—all because Snapchat committed to doling out $1 million per day to the users who submitted the best-performing videos. But with more users flooding the service, and more creators trying to get a piece of the Spotlight cash windfall, Snap is tasked with figuring out how to keep users and creators on Spotlight long term while staying true to the platform's long-held value proposition of personal, more private communication. And the company needs to figure out how it’ll pay top creators, and build a sustainable creator ecosystem, even after the million-dollar promise fades away. Advertisers are ready to buy in Spotlight is still embryonic, but Snap likes what it sees. In his quarterly remarks to investors, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel framed Spotlight as a way to leverage the power of what creators on the platform are already publishing. “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,” he said. After all, how do you copy a platform that revolutionized virality when your company values one-to-one or one-to-a few communication? Spiegel announced last week that 100 million of Snap’s 265 million active users scrolled through Spotlight in January. The company was only supposed to give out $1 million a day until Dec. 31, but it extended the giveaway indefinitely. And while Snap may see residual ad revenue from Spotlight elsewhere on the app, the company has yet to run ads against the 175,000 videos posted there each day. Advertisers are ready to buy into Spotlight once it’s monetized. For brands already on Snapchat, Spotlight allows them to “scale their advertising even more,” said Melanie Rhoads, group director for strategic accounts at Nexstar Digital. “I see this similar to when Facebook added Instagram and Facebook Story ad placements.” Plus, advertisers have been increasingly comfortable with Spotlight’s format, given the massive success of TikTok. “Brands that currently run within user Stories and similar experiences on other social platforms will see this as an opportunity to expand their creative, reach and efficiencies within entertaining content that have become increasingly popular over the last year,” said Tesas Kavanaugh, vp and group director for social at Havas Media. Influencer marketing campaigns on Spotlight might not yet be a sure bet for brands, as the correlation between subscriber count and Spotlight success is still unclear. For example, CJ and others only saw marginal increases in subscribers on Snapchat after their success on Spotlight. Placing the video front and center One barrier to Spotlight’s ongoing success is that with Spotlight, Snap wants great videos to go viral, but its relationship with creators is still unclear. There are no comments or public-facing engagement metrics, such as likes or shares, helpful for marketers to scout and benchmark influencers’ success, though creators can see those things privately. Even for verified creators on the app like CJ and Dominic, Snap only offers a limited public profile to which they can pin their favorite videos. “One thing that Snapchat did right was they weren’t paying specific creators; they opened it up to everybody,” said Giselle Ugarte, a professional influencer coach and CEO of her own consultancy, Action-Forward. “Even with the creator fund on TikTok, you need 10,000 followers to even qualify. With Snapchat Spotlight you can just sign up.” A Snap spokesperson told Adweek that while the $1 million per day is in place for now, the company is thinking about new ways to incentivize creators. “There certainly will continue to be ways we reward creators based on merit rather than just existing audience size or following,” the spokesperson said. “That is at the core of how we pay out from the $1 million a day. “[We] want to put the snap front and center.” The heyday is over Dominic Andre, a science-focused creator who first rose to fame on TikTok, didn’t even post on Spotlight until the second week and thought that he might have missed out on the big prizes. “I didn’t realize how real it was,” he said. A couple of weeks later, Dominic was told he won but didn’t know how much until later. His contact at Snap asked if he would be willing to speak to The New York Times about his winnings and disclose how much he made. He agreed, replying, “The only problem is I don’t know how much I won,” he said. “Are you sitting down?” the rep asked. He sat. “So for Week 2, you won $287,000.” Dominic immediately started crying. “And for Week 3, you won another $50,000.” The Spotlight money is harder to come by these days. In total, Dominic and his girlfriend, Mary Noura, have won more than $800,000 from Spotlight, though they have seen weekly winnings have dropped off a bit since the first payday. They are still averaging $50,000 a week, though, and the two recently purchased a house with their collective earnings. A few of Ugarte’s clients also cashed in on the Spotlight mania at the end of last year and “were able to drastically make life changes,” like place down payments on homes. “Now it’s pretty much impossible to get to that place. It’s very saturated,” she said. After CJ’s first check of around $100,000, she received two much smaller payments but, even though she keeps posting, she had not won any more money until this week, as she was just told on Friday that a new check, for an undisclosed sum, is on its way. Still, Spotlight is by far the most money a social media platform has ever paid her directly. “The most I’ve ever made on the [TikTok] creator fund was just over $4, and that was 2 or 3 million views in a day,” she said. Not everyone is on Spotlight for the long haul. “As soon as they’re done giving away money, I’m done,” one of Ugarte’s clients told her recently. Spotlight's road to lasting relevance CJ said that if Snap discontinues the incentive program, it will need to find a way to let creators grow a following through Spotlight. “What brought everyone here is the monetization, so they either need to have some opportunity to make money or they need to make it easier to grow your audience,” she said, noting that it should be easier to see “who made what” on Spotlight. She also suggested direct follow buttons on Spotlight videos, more tools on creators’ profiles, and a featured page to highlight top creators. While $1 million a day is probably unsustainable in the long run, Dominic thinks a program like it could provide a valuable alternative to the YouTube and TikTok creator funds, which pay fractions of a cent per view. Dominic put it this way: “TikTok said, 'We can make you famous overnight.' Snapchat is going to make you rich overnight.” If Snap can continue to incentivize creators to be on Spotlight by paying them sizable sums in the long run, perhaps it can build a more sustainable, meritocratic and lucrative creator economy. If the focus is on videos and payments, rather than rewarding the most followed creators, Spotlight would present some challenges to the established thinking about the business model behind content creation and influencer marketing. “Spotlight is more of a lake to fish out of,” Dominic said. “Your story is where you continue that conversation and continue that community, rather than have it the other way around.”

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Will Snapchat Spotlight Last Beyond Million-Dollar Payouts?

"TikTok said, 'We can make you famous overnight.' Snapchat is going to make you rich overnight."

Scott Nover

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