According to Snap, TikTok competitor Spotlight had 100 million users in January 2021, just two months after it was launched. The illustration hints at a surprisingly successful debut for the service, which has taken over the far-right tab on Snapchat.
However, TikTok likely still has a significant head start on the new service. TikTok said it had 100 million monthly users in the US in June 2020 alone, and signs suggest that the app has only grown since then. (On the flip side, the Instagram leader has said he is “not yet satisfied” with Reels, his short-form video competitor.)
Snap put a lot of money into Spotlight to help the section get through. The company promised to give away $ 1 million per day to developers for more than a month to get people to post videos and fill the service with fun things to watch. The initiative seemed to be working, and some developers viewed the service as a quick way to make big bucks. According to Evan Spiegel, Snap’s CEO, developers currently upload an average of 175,000 videos per day.
“While the development of this new content platform is still very early, we are very encouraged by the initial results and are excited about the potential of Spotlight to further expand our monetization capabilities in the future,” said Derek Andersen, CFO of Snap, in prepared remarks .
The function is still much more limited than with TikTok. Exploration is limited, and you can’t remix sounds or go down a rabbit hole with dance videos to a popular song, bot features that helped TikTok keep growing.
It’s also worth noting that Snap put the number in terms of monthly users if the company has long focused on daily users overall. This suggests that there is significantly less daily usage of the feature as someone only had to open the tab once in January to be considered a monthly user. Snap now has a total of 265 million users per day, up from 249 million in the previous quarter, the company said in its earnings release for the fourth quarter of 2020.
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