The Number Of Monthly Active Users Of Spotlight Has Exceeded 100 Million. How Far Is It From Defeating TikTok?

Snapchat is a "burn after reading" social software founded in 2011. Its current number of daily active users has reached 265 million, and most of its users are teenagers between the ages of 13-25. On November 23 last year, Snapchat launched the Spotlight short video section to compete with TikTok, and its short videos can be up to 60 seconds long.

When users publish self-created content, they can choose whether to synchronize it to Spotlight. In order to encourage users to regularly publish interesting content in Spotlight, Snapchat's approach is also very "simple and crude": Until the end of 2020, Snap will There are $1 million in rewards distributed on the app to the most popular creators.

As of January 2021, two months after its official launch, the number of monthly active users of Spotlight has exceeded 100 million.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was pleasantly surprised by the rapid growth. Derek Andersen, Snap's chief financial officer, said in his speech: "While the development of Spotlight is still in its early stages, we are encouraged by the results achieved so far and are excited about the potential for Spotlight to further expand in the future."

However, TikTok’s brilliant achievements cannot be easily surpassed. TikTok already had 100 million monthly active users in the United States alone in June 2020. App Annie predicts that TikTok's average monthly active users will reach 1.2 billion by 2021. Take Instagram Reels, another competitor that also targets TikTok, the person in charge of the project is even “not very satisfied” with Reels’ performance.

A closer look reveals that Snap's disclosure of Spotlight user data is uncharacteristically conservative, because Snap has long been accustomed to using the number of daily active users as a measurement standard, but this time Spotlight user data uses the number of monthly active users. As long as the user opens Spotlight once in January, it can be counted as a monthly active user of Spotlight. Therefore, this also vaguely reveals that Spotlight’s daily active user data is actually not very good.

Moreover, Spotlight currently has two obvious flaws in its functionality, making it unable to truly compare with TikTok. According to foreign media theverge, Spotlight’s current exploration function is very limited. Users cannot mix music or watch a series of dance videos following a song. Both of these functions have contributed to TikTok’s geometric growth.

Therefore, Spotlight still has a long way to go to truly defeat TikTok.