Snap announced today that it paid over $250 million to more than 12,000 creators this year on Spotlight, its TikTok clone. Unlike Snapchat’s friend-to-friend, ephemeral messaging, Spotlight allows users to reach a wide audience. Since last year when Spotlight launched, Snap says that creators are posting three times as often now.
It’s no secret that the race for short-form video dominance is underway. As TikTok became one of the fastest apps to reach 1 billion monthly active users, competitors like Snapchat Spotlight, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts rolled out creator funds to incentivize people to make content specifically for their platform. Instagram Reels won’t promote uploads with a TikTok watermark, while Snapchat reduced its original $1 million-per-day payouts because it was paying for too much “copycat content,” CEO Evan Spiegel said in September. Even platforms like LinkedIn, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, and Twitter are experimenting with TikTok-like feeds.
Now, Snap says that 65% of Spotlight submissi …
