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Snapchat‘s been in the short-form game a long time. Maybe that’s why it was so quick to adapt when TikTok started to take over.
In 2021, Snap–like YouTube, Instagram, and even Pinterest–was looking to capitalize on the new fever for short-form brought on by TikTok’s pandemic-time rise to power. It knew it had to (1) get creators to prioritize posting short videos on its platform, and (2) give them a good enough reward for it that they decided to stick around and keep uploading.
To accomplish both goals, Snapchat launched Spotlight, where it paid out a total of $1 million a day to creators whose short-form videos performed best during that 24-hour period. The strat was expensive, but it worked. David Dobrik, for example, was making over $100,000 a week from posting his content to Snap–and was talking about just how good the payouts were on his podcast, including interviewing creators like TikToker Cam Casey, who’d gotten a cool $2.7 million from Spotlight in just three months.
Eventually, though, Snap moved away from splashing all that cash on the daily. It still has Spotlight, but it’s definitely not paying out $1 million every 24 hours. And it’s also moved away from having Spotlight as its only vehicle for creator monetization. Now, a big part of creator earnings comes from ad revenue splits.
Splits have way more intense guidelines for getting in. Creators must:
- have at least 50,000 subscribers on their public profile
- have more than 25 million views or 12,000 hours of view time on their public profile over the past 28 days
- and last but not least, post at least 20 Snaps a day to their public story for 10 days out of the last 28 days
Those who make the cut get paid out the same way creators do on YouTube: The more ad impressions their content generates, the more $ they make.
I get into all this and more with Lauren Schnipper and Jim Shepherd, Snap’s director of global creator partnerships, in the latest installment of Creator Upload. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whenever you listen. You’re gonna dig it.
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