The article “Snapchat Wants You to Post, and It’s Willing to Pay Millions” by Taylor Lorenz, introduces the rise of Snapchat’s new feature, Spotlight, for content creators to earn significant amounts of money by uploading viral videos on their platform. The author showcases how individuals, like popular influencers and average users, have capitalized on the Spotlight campaign to gain wealth quickly. Lorenz provides examples like Cam Casey, a TikTok star who earned nearly $3 million by uploading videos to Spotlight, and Andrea Romo, an ordinary Snapchat user who made half a million dollars from one single viral video. Lorenz points out another benefit of Snapchat’s new feature by monetizing the content through Spotlight and transforming the new age of social media, attracting the attention of creators who previously struggled to earn money on the other platforms. The author describes how wealth isn’t the only benefit of Spotlight, it is also creating a community of creators and bringing them together. After stating all the benefits of this feature, Lorenz brings up the challenges that are ahead for Snapchat in trying to compete with TikTok, a social media platform that is dominating over other platforms, and maintaining the momentum of Spotlight while emphasizing the potential for creators to leverage their earnings for future projects and investments.
I am not on social media as much as other people in my age group. The only experience I have with social media is from watching friends on their social media adventures. The only platform I’m mainly on is YouTube and I’ll mostly just watch clips of skating, or mini-docs about a particular topic I find interesting. Misinformation is one of the things I come across the most on social media and whenever I come across something sketchy I’ll fact-check it and do some research even if it’s something small and silly because I don’t want to spread the wrong information and look like an uncultured swine in front of people. I would change this by putting an advisement/discretion or some type of warning on the video or short to let people know that the information or source is not credible and shouldn’t be taken as fact. Even outside of this, like the News articles should have this warning label because the backing of these sources can’t be trusted since you don’t know where the funding is coming from.
