Snap says its TikTok competitor, Spotlight, had 100 million users in January 2021, just two months after launch. The figure suggests a surprisingly successful debut for the service, which has taken the rightmost tab within Snapchat.
“We are pleasantly surprised by the momentum,” said Snap CEO Evan Spiegel in an investor conference call this afternoon to discuss the company’s fourth quarter 2020 earnings.
TikTok probably still has significant leadership in the new service, however. TikTok said it had 100 million monthly users in the United States alone in June 2020, and signs suggest that the app has only continued to grow since then. (On the other hand, the Instagram leader said he “is still not happy with” Reels, his short video competitor.)
Snap invested a lot of money in Spotlight to help the section catch on. The company promised to give creators $ 1 million a day for more than a month for people to post videos, filling the service with fun things to watch. The initiative apparently worked, with some creators seeing the service as a quick way to earn a lot of money. The creators are now uploading 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 highly encouraged by the initial results and excited about the potential of Spotlight to further expand our monetization opportunity in the future,” said CFO Derek Andersen of Snap in prepared comments.
Now that the service has been seeded with videos, Spiegel said that Snap can start working harder to optimize its recommendation system. The announcements will come in the future, but for now the company has its “focus on increasing engagement”.
Spotlight is still much more limited than TikTok. Exploration options are limited and you cannot remix sounds or go to the rabbit hole of dance videos with popular music, both of which have helped TikTok continue to grow.
It is also important to note that Snap provided the number in terms of monthly users when the company long ago focused on daily users in general. This suggests that the daily use of the resource is much less, since someone only had to open the tab once in January to be considered a monthly user. Snap now has 265 million daily users in general, against 249 million in the previous quarter.
February 4 update, 18:14 ET: This story was updated with comments from Snap’s earnings conference call.