Snapchat's million-dollar idea

For TikTok to succeed over the long term, it has to retain D’Amelio and its other top creators even as their success continuously brings them new opportunities. (Facebook is already coming for them.) For Snap to succeed, it only has to regularly convince average people to play the lottery in between messaging their friends. This bears close watchin... See more

What Snap is asking with Spotlight, the company’s own take on short-form video, is whether you can build an engine for culture that benefits many thousands of people, rather than hundreds. The company’s idea is to replace public follower counts, likes, and comments with something that more closely resembles a lottery — and at least through the end ... See more

do. The real opportunity for Snap here isn’t that it incubates the next Charli D’Amelio in Spotlight — it’s that thousands of creators make real money on the platform, either once or a large handful of times, and we never learn their names at all. That would be something truly new in social networks — intermittent financial rewards just for using t... See more

Notably, Snap is placing its incentives at the level of the content, rather than the creator. While some Spotlight posts bear the creator’s name, many really are anonymous — allowing people to profit from their posts without having to develop (and eventually become boxed in by) Snapchat-specific personas.