Snapchat rolls out TikTok rival offering that will pay users $1 million a day

Snapchat is updating its app with a new feature called Spotlight that will encourage people to share more creative videos publicly, and it will give out $1 million a day to users to participate in the section, which will surely draw comparisons to TikTok, too. On Monday, Snapchat announced its latest product update, becoming the latest social media app to find itself needing to adjust to compete with TikTok, the Chinese-owned app that has remade the social media landscape. On the surface, Spotlight looks like TikTok’s “For You” page, which is a feed of videos from everyday people that is customized for each user. Snapchat’s Spotlight page will have videos from users that incorporate some of that same behavior—leaning on dances, memes, comedy and general interests. Also, there is the ability to highlight Snapchat’s augmented reality Lenses, which are considered to be the most advanced in the industry. Spotlight will not show ads when it launches today. Usually, social media companies introduce the ads later in a product’s life cycle. Until today, Snapchat has enabled some public sharing of videos, with users contributing to Stories that can be seen by the whole community. Snapchat has 249 million daily active users across the globe; 90 million in the U.S. Snapchat says it will start paying out $1 million a day, through the end of the year, to reward the best videos in Spotlight. The company said the payouts will be determined by how popular a video is and how often people view it, among other criteria. Snapchat did not say what the maximum pay for each video would be. Snapchat finds itself in an unfamiliar position having to redesign the service in order to keep current. Typically, it’s Snapchat that has been leading the way, pushing concepts like video Stories and augmented reality, and older rivals like Facebook and YouTube have been trying to keep up. Now, much of Silicon Valley is trying to fend off TikTok, which is owned by Chinese-based ByteDance. TikTok claims to reach close to 100 million U.S. users. The app delivers personalized feeds of entertainment to users, who scroll through video after video, often featuring new dances and songs. TikTok has forced many companies to rethink their approach. This summer, Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, built Reels in order to mimic TikTok. Last week, Snapchat bought an app called Voisey, which notably incorporates music and videos similar to TikTok. When it announced Spotlight, Snapchat said it wanted to have a place where users could share more publicly, rather than see people create videos on Snap and then share them to outside apps.

Snapchat rolls out TikTok rival offering that will pay users $1 million a day

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