Big news! Snapchat launches TikTok competitor Spotlight globally

When it was first launched, Spotlight has covered 11 countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and France; recently, Spotlight was launched in India; and this week, Spotlight will officially go global !

The launch of Spotlight dates back to November last year. In order to compete with the popular short video platform TikTok, Snapchat launched Spotlight, where creators can upload their videos and snapshots.

“While Snapchat has not historically been a fertile ground for social media creators, Spotlight was created with the goal of changing that,” said Maarten Boon, senior product marketing manager at digital asset management startup Bynder .

To this end, Snapchat also pays $1 million per day to reward the best-performing videos. The reward program was originally scheduled to expire at the end of 2020, but Snapchat decided to extend the offer. So far, Snapchat has provided a total of more than $110 million in funding in major markets for Spotlight .

As of January 2021, two months after Spotlight was officially launched, its monthly active users have exceeded 100 million, and creators submit an average of 175,000 videos per day . At that time, the application was launched in only 11 countries, and now its global expansion means that more users will flock to the application.

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel did not specify when the company would start selling ads in Spotlight, saying the priority now was to increase user engagement to support the platform's long-term operations .

It’s worth noting that many creators who benefited from the rewards program said they would continue to use the app even after the program ended because they had already built a fan base, which could help with future brand deals and more .

eMarketer predicts that brands’ spending on in-app video ads will increase 28% to $18 billion in the U.S. this year . Snapchat is hoping that as more marketers use video ads, Spotlight can become a major channel for advertisers and brands.

However, it remains to be seen whether Spotlight can have a considerable number of users and truly attract large brands.

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