Snapchat has not yet said when ‘mid-roll ads’ will be available to all of its users. — AFP pic
SANTA MONICA, Feb 17 — Snapchat hasn’t said its last word when it comes to taking on TikTok. After launching Spotlight to counter the Chinese giant, the social network now wants to develop more ads in its Story format. A way to generate even more content and money?
How do you get content creators to post more content on Snapchat? With money, of course! Snapchat has unveiled a new way for influencers to monetise their content with the Story format. The social network has launched a first trial among a handful of American creators. The latter users will be able to insert “mid-roll ads” into their Story, splitting it in two parts. A process already used by YouTube.
For the moment, only verified Snap Star accounts on the application — identified by a gold star and followed by a large number of users — will have access to this new monetisation system.
According to Snapchat, the revenue collected from advertising will be shared between the platform and the creators, taking into account the frequency of publication and the engagement generated.
For the company, this is one more step in its efforts to help, and especially entice, creators to publish even more content on the app while also preventing them from leaving for other platforms.
According to Evan Spiegel, the co-founder of the social network’s parent company Snap, Snapchat users are spending more and more time watching content on Spotlight, the platform’s TikTok competitor, rather than posting and watching Stories.
Could this be a direct consequence of Snap’s strategy? In 2020, the American company promised to pay certain creators US$1 million (RM4.2 million) per day if they published more content on the new Spotlight tool — a way for the social network to resist the TikTok craze.
These efforts also include Spotlight Challenges, challenging users to make videos using the filters, lenses and sounds available on Spotlight, in order to reach the top of a ranking and potentially win money.
Snap revealed that it paid more than US$250 million to creators in 2021. — ETX Studio