Lili Mei – Conversation 3

In the article “Snapchat Wants You to Post. It’s Willing to Pay Millions”, the author introduces the audience to a new feature called “Spotlight” in Snapchat, where people can post short videos about anything they’d like to share. The twist is that it pays content creators for any viral video they have published. At first, Snapchat was not designed to display viral content and pay content creators, but as the industry changed, so did this app; going through a few examples, they mentioned and asked some content creators how it changed their lives, such as Katie Feeney, who was able to pay for college tuition by posting unboxing videos and funny content, or how Cam Casey was paid millions of dollars for a viral video about a science experiment, all this thanks to the engagement they got. This was possible due to some transformations Snapchat did compared to other apps, like TikTok, that only pay company-approved content creators, whereas Snapchat pays for those who have big engagements and viral videos. Snapchat is paying millions of dollars for people to use it, since anyone can post videos they’d like to share, and anyone is able to monetize their videos; because of this, many content creators who are on Tiktok are shifting their content to Snapchat, however, this has caused an oversaturation of content creators on Spotlight, and so the payments have gotten smaller. For now, Mike Meztler, a Snapchat creator said that social media creators are united to help each other out and to seek strategies where they can grow together in terms of views, and what type of content is working; another influencer, Dominic Andre, is planning to use his funds to create a collab house on Spotlight, similar to the collab houses on Tiktok.

Reading this article about Snapchat reminded me of how much impact social media has on our generation, where people get viral even with the simplest things, and how social media has changed over the years, adapting itself to the trends, and lately, being a way of earning money. I was born in a technological and social media era and was certainly influenced by everything I saw on the Internet growing up, now I am still using social media, including Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok, and there is usually a lot of fake news going around, as well as people spreading information that they have no idea about or haven’t done any research before sharing this type of information to people who will believe what they see. Sometimes I spend too much time on social media without noticing, and that has distracted me from daily obligations, so I have tried to regulate how much time I spend on the phone. After reading this article, I would say that we have to be careful with what we share on social media, since nowadays it is easier to share private information and daily life activities than before, considering how social media has become a big part of our lives, being of the main sources of media. We have to be aware that not everything we see is true, and that we can always try to search for reliable sources.

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