TikTok is already banned in India and might be banned in the U.S. too. Snapchat did manage to give TikTok a tough fight with its music-powered features. The company has officially released a dedicated feed called Spotlight that extends Snapchat’s TikTok-like short video-making efforts to a whole new level.
According to Snapchat, Spotlight showcases both Snaps and videos backed by music on a single platform. Moreover, the feed will showcase interesting Snaps based on a set of robust algorithms that tailor to user’s personalized interests.
Spotlight takes various factors into consideration such as how interesting the Snap is and how long users have watched it. The algorithm also considers negative factors such as if users skipped directly and it learns on the user’s behavior. This is similar to how TikTok’s For You feed works.
All the users can view content generated by users both private and public on the feed. Although users can view both Snaps and short videos from public and private accounts, the Snaps from the latter won’t be attributed to the user. Snapchat has organized a $1 million award pool a day for users ages 16 and above. Here, the users can win huge amounts as prizes for the best entering content that raises user engagement through the roof. The winning content creators will get the prize till the end of this year.
Facebook followed with similar awarding prizes to boost the popularity of Instagram Reels. Even Snapchat’s competitor TikTok was planning a similar stint with a prize pool of $200 million to be awarded to the content creators.
According to the reports, Spotlight is free of any ads at least for the initial phase. Snapchat will introduce ads as a way to churn revenue in the coming months although we aren’t aware of the ETA.
Spotlight explains that users can opt to publish their profiles as public if they are aged 18 and above. Although users will be able to reply to the creators privately, there won’t be any comment section. This enables Snapchat to simply bypass any content moderator.
Note that users will have to abide by the Community Guidelines which prohibits hate speech, bullying, violent, profane content, misleading content, or any type of toxic content on-board.
