SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 6 ― The race is on between TikTok and Snapchat. Snapchat has announced that its Spotlight service counts 100 million monthly users on the platform ― a flying start in the race to outstrip the Chinese giant and its 700 million users.

"We're very pleasantly surprised with the momentum,” said the Snapchat boss, Evan Spiegel, on a call with investors, Thursday, February 4. The new Spotlight service is showing promising results just two months since it launched. In fact, the social network's new product had some 100 million monthly users in January 2021. It's a successful start for the platform, which hopes to rival sector giant TikTok, whose popularity continues to grow, especially among Gen Z.

To launch Spotlight on its platform, Snapchat stumped up the means to create a buzz. The platform promised to give away over US$1 million per day to its most prolific creators on Spotlight in a bid to motivate them to post plenty of videos at the year-end. And it seems to have paid off, since an average 175,000 videos per day are being uploaded to the service. According to the New York Times, Snapchat users have also benefited, with some top performers making millions of dollars from videos that went viral.

But will this flying start be enough to put fear into the Chinese giant? In June 2020, TikTok announced 100 million monthly users in the USA alone, and the platform hasn't stopped drawing in new fans since. Snapchat also omitted to state the number of active users per day ― an oversight which could be intentional, since the platform usually tends to release these figures. This decision could potentially hide some less impressive stats for investors concerning this new part of the application. Indeed, to be counted as a monthly user, an account holder just has to open the application at least one time in the month, rather than every day.

Nevertheless, Snapchat continues to appeal. Fifteen million new users joined the platform in the last quarter. Now, 265 million people use this social network, leading to a 62 per cent rise in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020, compared to the previous year. ― ETX Studio