Snapchat's Giving Away a Million Dollars Every Single Day to Promote "Spotlight"

Ever since TikTok debuted there have been tons of social media platforms scrambling to offer their own versions of the experience. For one reason or another, TikTok has become a huge social media craze, and Instagram and Snapchat are scrambling to get their own users to post TikTok-style repeat clips on their respective platforms. 

Snapchat's even launched a Million Dollar Giveaway in order to lure more people towards its Spotlight feature.

The ghost-rocking application isn't just used for sending risque pics to random folks you matched with on Tinder anymore. The company has branched out into different offerings and is hoping that its built-in userbase will use it for more than just chatting with friends and posting private stories. While Snapchat's been evolving its video offerings for a while now, Spotlight is the brand's biggest attempt at branching out even further.

In order to get more and more people posting to Spotlight and using the feature, Snapchat's been offering a million dollars a day to lucky posters who are randomly chosen by its algorithm to feature creators on the Spotlight feed. It's basically a version of TikTok's "for you" page, and you endlessly scroll down the page and come across different accounts that have tons of short-form clips.

Each video that gets featured on the Spotlight page will be offered the chance to partake in the sweet $1,000,000 a day prize that's been offered by Snapchat since Nov. 23, 2020. Snapchat has a whole slew of different metrics that are being used to decide just how much money people make off of uploading their clips, however, there have been some people who've made life-changing amounts of money, and it doesn't look like Snapchat's stopping the revenue sharing any time soon.

TikTok user turned full-time Snapchat uploader Cam Cassey earned a whopping $2.7 million in revenue after she started uploading old videos to Spotlight. The New York Times did a story on a bunch of folks who've managed to make big bucks by getting in early on the trend, and there are more than a few people who've managed to upload content and get way more of a following on Spotlight than compared to other platforms.

The company's worth a lot of money, so while $1 million a day seems like a lot, it's not for an application that's worth around $80 billion and has $2.75 billion in liquid cash to disseminate. Its giveaway was supposed to only last until the end of 2020 but it's still going strong as of March 2. 

In addition to Spotlight, however, there are other features Snapchat is currently pushing.

Public profiles have been around on the platform for quite some time and the application is trying its darndest to get out its Snap Originals for more and more people to view.

Snapchat's decision to give away a ton of money to get people to upload on its platform seems like a move that's working for the app.

However, it's pretty vague when it comes to just how people are making their money. TikTok's been pretty transparent about its payment structure and there are plenty of users who've reported that they receive anywhere from .02 to .04 cents per 1,000 views that they receive on the videos that they upload. This means that every view is worth between .0002 and .0004 cents.

While that doesn't seem like a lot of money, some of the most followed and viewed accounts on the platform could stand to earn a lot of money per short clip. For example, this Bella Poarch video received some 4 million hearts on TikTok. She's one of the most followed accounts on the platform, but if we assume that everyone who liked the video watched it at least once, then that means she earned anywhere from $80 to $160 for that video alone, unless my math is way, way off.

There are also other factors to consider with TikTok fame and superstardom: You're going to get a lot of views the longer you're on the platform. You're also going to get sent a lot of swag and maybe get paid endorsements to feature certain songs or products in your videos, so the extra money from the Creator Fund that you get for uploading videos is just icing on the cake.