Snapchat last year announced plans to pay creators on short term videos called “Spotlights”, 1 million dollars a day, where they’d get a cut of that based on video views.
CNBC interviewed a Wendy’s employee who went viral on Snapchat, getting 300,000 views in 24 hours and was paid $19,600 on a video that was about 30 seconds long.
Just for some perspective, a creator I know averages 1.5m views a day on TikTok. They began using the creator fund this summer. Their payments on 1.5m views a day, only average $70-100 a day.
For a better perspective, their lowest day since using the fund was 350,000 views and that paid about $20.
This guy was paid what it’d take several hundred million views on TikTok for one video, which was more or less the same as a tiktok video.
Quick comparison to YouTube, which would likely not pay anything on a 30 second video, but does pay for videos over 3 minutes.
1 million views there would be about $4,000 on a 3 minute video.
300,000 views, would be about $1,300.
Snapchat made a model of paying basically 1,000x what TikTok was and 15-20x what Youtube does.
Logic behind this.
Snapchat created Spotlight, to get content creators on to retain retention for Snapchat users and get them using the app for longer periods of time.
They pumped an insane amount of money into it and paid creators at a loss over what they actually brought in, to try and get more creators in, higher quality content and more people seeing Snapchat as an entertainment platform.
Which it worked.
126 million monthly spotlight users.
Increased Snapchat’s overall growth rate.
Content went up 300% and apparently quality was better.
Something which seems like other companies are copying.
YouTube announced 100 million will be paid to creators doing shorts.
Facebook is paying 1 billion to creators on reels for Facebook/Instagram.
But does this actually work long term?
Snapchat this summer cut payments massively.
The same creator who made $19,600 off one video came out saying he makes about $10 off a video with 300,000 views now.
One creator who made $250,000 off Snapchat said she quit, because payments dried up and was moving to YouTube/TikTok.
So, was this long term a good move for Snapchat?
Hard to tell.
Yes, short term, but no if the quality drops as creators leave and the product loses quality.
The big edge Snapchat has is they should be able to pay more to creators per minute than Instagram, TikTok & even Youtube.
Reason?
It’s not a video app.
The average user on Snapchat spends about 30 minutes a day on the app and that study came long before they added Spotlight.
Videos seem more like a hook to get less active users back in or something to give active users something to do while waiting for responses, versus go to other apps.
They can still monetize videos the same way everyone else does, but have the edge of an entirely different purpose in the app, which money there can go to pay creators.
They can likely always pay 10-25% more and hold some edge there versus the others.
All said, sort of an amusing look at how companies are looking to get into short videos to up activity on products.