Snap says its TikTok rival, Spotlight, had 100 million users in January 2021, just two months after its launch. The figure points to a surprisingly successful debut for the service, which has taken over the right-hand tab in Snapchat.
“We are very pleasantly surprised by the momentum,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said this afternoon in a call to investors to discuss the company’s earnings in the Q4 2020.
However, TikTok probably still has a significant advantage over the new service. TikTok said it has 100 million monthly users in the United States as of June 2020, and signs indicate that the app has only grown further since then. (On the other hand, Instagram’s leader said he was “still not happy with” Reels, his short-form video competition.)
Snap put a lot of money behind Spotlight to help fetch the division. The company has promised to give away $ 1 million a day to creators for more than a month to get people to post videos and fill the service with fun things to watch. The initiative has apparently worked, and some creators see the service as a quick way to make a lot of money. Creators now upload an average of 175,000 videos a day, Spiegel said in prepared comments.
“Although it is still very early in the development of this new content platform, we are very encouraged by the initial results and excited about the potential that Spotlight will further expand our monetization opportunity in the future,” CFO Derek Andersen, Snap in prepared remarks said. .
Now that the service has been cultured with videos, Spiegel said Snap could do more work to optimize its recommendation system. Advertising will get out of the way, but for now the company has its “focus on growing engagement.”
Spotlight is still much more limited than TikTok. Exploration options are limited, and you can not remix sounds or go into a rabbit hole of dance videos to a popular song, both features that helped TikTok grow.
It is also noteworthy that Snap gave the figure in terms of monthly users, as the company has long placed a focus on daily users. This indicates that the daily usage of the feature is much lower, as someone only needs to open the page once in January to be considered a monthly user. Snap now boasts 265 million daily users, up from 249 million in the previous quarter.
Update February 4, 18:14 ET: This story has been updated with comments from Snap’s earnings call.