Snapchat is again taking a pay cut for Spotlight content

Snapchat is reducing the reward money that creators can receive when they create content for the platform's TikTok competitor — again.

Business Insider reports that the pot of cash for users making Spotlight videos now sits at millions of dollars per year. In February, Snap said it was offering millions each month to creators creating high-performance short-form videos for Spotlight. Even when Spotlight first launched in the fall of 2020, there was a downside, and Snap has decided to pay people $1 million per day to make TikTok-style videos. great promise.

Snap spokesman Farin Jay confirmed that the fund sits at "millions of dollars a year" and said the company is focused on rewarding Spotlight creators in more markets.

As a Business Insider story reported, making Spotlight videos was attractive to content creators—at least for a while. A creator was able to earn between $20,000 and $50,000 a month at once, until Snap began reducing payments. Another said that they were earning around $15,000 for getting 150,000 views on their videos in 2021, but are now getting $15 for hitting the same number. Snap has also introduced Spotlight Challenges, which pay users to create hit videos using certain lenses or sounds, or while performing certain activities.

Although maker payments are dwindling, Spotlight still appears to be a priority for the company: In a leaked internal memo from September, CEO Evan Spiegel told employees he wants 30 percent of users on Spotlight every day for the next year.

Several other platforms have tried to throw money at their TikTok size problems. To make users Instagram reel, the company was paying $35,000 a pop last year as part of a "bonus" program. But like Snapchat's Spotlight Fund, creators told the Financial Times that those payments were slashed this spring. In 2020, TikTok itself announced a $1 billion creator fund and later added ad revenue sharing with some of the creators.

Times are still tough even for the very rich tech platforms, and many are trying to handle the dominance of TikTok. Snap cut its workforce by about 20 percent this summer, and although it's far from alone in reducing headcount, the cuts were deeper than at other tech companies.