Would you pay £1m a day to your talent?

In the battle for the attention of the young, TikTok and Snapchat are really going for it.

Snapchat has invented much of what has been adopted by other services, including Stories and timed, disappearing messages. It has also innovated with what its camera can do. The rise of TikTok, though, has been uncomfortable for Snapchat as it too targets 13 to 19s and has become the de-facto place for young people to consume short form, entertaining video clips.

Snapchat itself hasn’t gone away (they have 90m daily active users in the US, 249m across the world). It’s also still massively used as a messaging platform between teens, and indeed lots use Snapchat’s camera to make their TikToks. The problem for Snapchat was that it concentrated on the original social network feed idea of showing content just from the people that you’re following. Meanwhile TikTok exposed public posts more easily for other people to find. With many social media users always clamouring for more attention, this feature resonated well, and particularly because much of social video is literally performing for others.

Snapchat’s answer was to add TikTok style functionality to its app, but more importantly to incentivise its use. To do this they announced they would be giving successful creators a share of $1m every day.

Read more…