Snapchat's Spotlight already has 100 million users

Snap Inc. -- the company that developed Snapchat --announced that it managed to acquire 100 million users on its new service on Snapchat, Spotlight. Spotlight is Snap’s answer to TikTok, the Chinese social media platform that acquired 1 billion users in January 2021.

The announcement came during the O4 2020 earnings conference call. CEO Evan Spiegel said he was “pleasantly surprised with the momentum”.

Snap Inc. has a lot invested into Spotlight, including monthly giveaways of $1 million per day to get people to post and share videos on the platform. Well, it worked. Creators are now uploading 175,000 videos per day.

“While it is still very early in the development of this new content platform, we are highly encouraged by the initial results and excited about the potential for Spotlight to further expand our monetization opportunity in the future,” " Snap’s CFO Derek Anderson remarked.

Spotlight’s still got a long fight ahead of it but for now, it needs to win the war of daily users against TikTok. The social media giant had 100 million users monthly in the United States in June of 2020.

Snap Inc. went all out on Snapchat’s new feature when it announced it will pony up at least a million rewarding the top posts on the app per day. This went on for a month, ending in 2020. The people chosen were also not picked by metrics such as subscriber numbers; instead Snap chose from a pool of people with the greatest number of unique views per video.

Another TikTok competitor, Facebook’s Instagram launched a Reels feature in August. It even has support for importing TikTok content into the service. By comparison, Spotlight does not allow that, and Snap hopes that people will use its own creation tools instead.