Snapchat paying $1 million a day to standard video creators

Evan Alberto made nearly a million dollars on Snapchat

Courtesy Evan Alberto

Evan Alberto says he’s well on his way to becoming a millionaire in just a few weeks thanks to his consistent use of Snapchat.

As of late November, the company has maintained a daily pool of $ 1 million that it pays out to creators of each day’s top performing videos through its short-form video service, Spotlight. The company determines the payout based on the number of times a video is viewed versus other popular snapshots.

The move is designed to attract more developers to create videos for Spotlight, the company’s TikTok competitor, which in turn will help Snap users in and out. Spotlight has grown to more than 100 million monthly active users, the company said in its latest call to win, and has over 175,000 video submissions per day. Meanwhile, the app grew from 249 million in the third quarter to a total of 265 million daily active users in the fourth quarter of 2020.

To date, Snap has spent more than $ 110 million in total in the markets where Spotlight is live. Alberto, 22, is one of the company’s youngest benefactors.

“Originally, I just did it to get more exposure. I wasn’t exactly sure how much money was in it,” said Alberto, who has been a content creator for two years. One evening he made a short video with his girlfriend over dinner and posted it and didn’t think about it much. Two weeks later, he received a notification that the video had grossed him $ 94,000.

“When the first check came in from Snap, I thought it was a typo,” he said. Since then he has been working on posting 20 to 40 videos a day under the handle @evanthecardguy, where he has 111,000 subscribers. He says he made around $ 900,000 as of March 18 from his videos doing magic tricks, challenges, and “basically anything that goes with game show hype.”

Alberto said he was using his earnings to look for his first home. He even got a tattoo of the Snapchat ghost logo on his ankle and of course posted the experience as a spotlight.

“This is a great opportunity to make the most of it,” he said.

Snap’s millionaires club

Alberto is likely to soon join a growing list of content creators who have become millionaires through the social media company. According to Snap, since November 2020 “several” users have become millionaires through the club.

The company recently launched Spotlight in India, Mexico and Brazil along with its $ 1 million per day incentive program.

“Traditionally, a platform like TikTok comes out and steals attention from other places, but Snapchat seems to be re-igniting,” Alberto said. “People think of snap as a way to write stories and communicate with friends. I think they are really trying to open the door and have content creators. I think it would be really interesting if they seize this moment to really make Snapchat a place. ” for influencers. “

The developers say the feature brought them back to the app and made them spend more time on it.

“Spotlight is definitely causing a stir in the community,” said Sarah Callahan, a content creator from Sarati. Callahan, a 25-year-old with 725,000 subscribers on the app, told CNBC that she made $ 1.63 million on the platform from her meme and fitness content to date.

“Spotlight gives a lot of people a voice and allows anyone to do something with it. But the more you post, the more you do, the more money you’ll make from Spotlight,” she said. “All of the creators there are consistent and do it as a business.”

Callahan, who has worked full-time as a creator and slowing down her acting jobs since the pandemic, said she tries to post between 10 and 50 videos a day to optimize cash benefits. (The app only lets creators post every five minutes.)

According to four developers, Snapchat pays developers a lot more money than other social media platforms. Even for people who have made content creation their full-time job, they make way more of Spotlight when compared to other individual platforms.

“If you make it to TikTok, where we make 4 cents for 1,000 views, that makes an incredible difference,” said Joey Rogoff, a 21-year-old who publishes comedic challenges, pranks, and puzzles on Spotlight. So far, he said he made about $ 1.7 million from Spotlight and has 28,000 subscribers.

The developers know that the payouts get smaller as the app gets more saturated, and the $ 1 million per day program can be discontinued at any time. However, they told CNBC that they will continue to use the app after the payouts expired, as this is another way for them to reach several thousand people at a time, and they have already built a following. This could later be useful in branded stores, for example, where a developer can quote a large number of followers in the app and increase rates or work with different brands.

“Where the creators benefit most, the creators spend most of their time. I think having that audience on another platform is very valuable,” said Rogoff. “I haven’t even qualified for payment in the past few weeks, but I still post as much as I can and just split my time across different platforms.”

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