Snapchat users will be able to tip high-profile creators through the app’s chat feature later this year, Snap said Thursday. The move pushes the social media company further toward creator monetization.
Users will be able to purchase in-app tokens and use them to purchase “gifts” to send to creators via story responses. Creators can withdraw money once they accumulate $ 100 in gifts.
Snapchat, which now reaches 500 million monthly active users, will take a share of the gifts sent, but declined to say how much.
Social media companies are adding more ways for creators to monetize their content to attract more users. This also helps them diversify their advertising revenue.
Twitter, for example, recently released its Tip Jar for some users to add to their profiles. Twitter has also worked on an offer called “Super Follows,” which could allow users to pay to view tweets from their favorite accounts.
Shares of Snap closed more than 5% higher on Thursday.
Snapchat will also reformat the $ 1 million-a-day incentive program for Spotlight, its TikTok clone, starting next month. Instead of a daily deal, Snap users can earn out of a pool of “millions” of dollars each month. The company declined to provide an exact figure.
Since the end of November, the company has maintained a fund of $ 1 million a day that pays creators of the best-performing videos of each day on its short-form video service. The company determined payouts based on the number of views a video received compared to other highly-viewed snapshots.
Snap said that more than 5,400 creators have collectively made more than $ 130 million so far. Because the company will continue to pay in some form, users are unlikely to completely switch to competitors who also pay users, such as YouTube and TikTok.
Snap is also launching Story Studio, a free, standalone mobile editing app for creators. Users will be able to explore trends and insights and share videos directly on Snapchat or other platforms. The company said that Story Studio will launch on iOS later in 2021.
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