Spotlight's monthly active users have exceeded 100 million. How far is it from defeating TikTok?

Snapchat is a "disappearing" social software founded in 2011. It currently has 265 million daily active users, most of whom are teenagers aged between 13 and 25. On November 23 last year, Snapchat launched the Spotlight short video section to compete with TikTok , with a maximum length of 60 seconds.

When users post their own content, they can choose whether to sync it to Spotlight . In order to encourage users to regularly post interesting content on Spotlight , Snapchat 's approach is very "simple and crude": until the end of 2020, Snap will distribute $1 million in rewards to the most popular creators on the app every day.

As of January 2021, two months after its official launch, Spotlight 's monthly active users have exceeded 100 million.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was pleasantly surprised by the rapid growth. Snap CFO Derek Andersen said in his speech: "Although Spotlight is still in its early stages of development, we are already very encouraged by the results we have achieved so far and are excited about the potential for further expansion of Spotlight in the future."

However, TikTok 's brilliant achievements are not so easy to be surpassed. In June 2020, TikTok already had 100 million monthly active users in the United States alone. App Annie predicts that TikTok 's average monthly active users will reach 1.2 billion by 2021. Take Instagram Reels , another competitor of TikTok , for example. The person in charge of the project is even "not very satisfied" with the performance of Reels .

A closer look reveals that Snap 's disclosure of Spotlight user data is unusually conservative, because Snap has long been accustomed to using daily active users as a measurement standard, but this time Spotlight 's user data uses monthly active users. As long as a user opens Spotlight once in January , they can be counted as Spotlight 's monthly active users. Therefore, this also subtly reveals that Spotlight 's daily active user data is actually not very good.

Moreover, Spotlight currently has two obvious flaws in its functionality, which prevents it from being truly comparable to TikTok . According to foreign media theverge , Spotlight 's current exploration function is very limited. Users cannot remix music or watch a series of dance videos to a song, both of which have contributed to TikTok 's geometric growth.

Therefore, if Spotlight wants to truly defeat TikTok , it still has a long way to go.

Snapchat