Content is king - but for how long?

Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/style/snapchat-spotlight.html 

Virality is fascinating to me, mainly because it's one of the few things today that is hard to manufacture or curate online (for the most part). Yes, the orange instagram post for fyre festival was created to go viral (and did) but there are few examples of those. 

With the monstrous growth of TikTok, virality becomes the dominant feature. Any person with a smartphone + data can create a video that could be featured on the FYP (For You Page), earn them thousands to millions of followers and potentially result in a lucrative contract from the TikTok Creator Fund. Instagram (owned by the perennial feature copier, Facebook) soon followed in TikTok's footsteps and created Reels. Although Facebook had the ecosystem and user base to quickly ramp up and compete, the features still did not match TikTok's unique algorithms. Now, per the article highlighted above, Snapchat has entered the game. Instead of competing with TikTok features, they are instead investing in customer acquisition, aka paying users whose video goes viral. This approach gamifies virality even more, because instead of showcasing a video, making it go viral, and getting the user many followers, now with Snapchat Spotlight, those users could also get a $1M payday. Snapchat has apparently paid out $1M/day since they launched in November. 

Is it worth it? I think it depends on the goal. If increasing DAUs (which often is a key metric for companies like Snapchat) from an app as popular as TikTok is the goal, then yes. But how long can Snapchat keep this up? How do they determine the ROI in these efforts? What will Instagram do as a response? I'm looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.