Snapchat’s New Spotlight Wants To Become TikTok, By Paying Users

Snapchat recently unveiled it’s new ‘Spotlight’ feature, aimed at accommodating brief, music-driven clips (sound familiar?) along with news that users who create the most popular Spotlight posts will be receiving some monetary compensation for their efforts.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

Snapchat recently introduced a new feature called Spotlight in 11 countries, including the United States and Canada specifically designed to accommodate the type of short, music-driven videos that have become a staple of TikTok. 

While Snapchat users always posted short videos, they were relegated to their circle of friends on the app. That meant that the clips also had to be posted onto other platforms like Instagram and TikTok if they wanted to reach a wider audience. The significance of Spotlight is that it now allows users to reach more people with their posts while staying completely in Snapchat.

Although any Snapchat user can access Spotlight, a posted video will still only reach their circle of friends. Further reach is determined by an algorithm that will determine how widely the video post will be shared. Like on other platforms, the algorithm takes into account data regarding how long people watch the video and whether they share it with friends, among other things.

The Promotion

While rolling out a new feature might not be that exciting to occasional or non-Snapchat users, the expectation of winning money might be. That’s why the platform will now pay $1 million each day to the users who create the most popular Spotlight posts. Contestants have to be at least 16 years old and their post must reach a certain number of unique video views with a performance comparable to others posts from that same day.

By its very nature, Snapchat is a rather private platform, as users who aren’t public figures keep their identities hidden by default and must manually choose to make their profile public. Reportedly, Snapchat doesn’t plan to let people publicly comment on Spotlight posts but will enable direct replies on public profiles of users over the age of 18.

Here’s the promo video on Snapchat Spotlight that the company released.