Spotlight shines a light on the most entertaining Snaps created by the Snapchat community, no matter who created them. We built Spotlight to be a place where anyone’s content can take center stage - without needing a public account, or an influencer following. It’s a fair and fun place for Snapchatters to share their best Snaps and see perspectives from across the Snapchat community.
Our Recommendations
Our content algorithms work to surface the most engaging Snaps you’d be interested in. We focus on serving the right Snaps to the right person at the right time. We do this by trying to understand your personal preferences.
Our ranking algorithm looks at factors that show people are interested in a particular Snap, like: the amount of time spent watching it, if it is favorited, and if it’s shared with friends. It also considers negative factors, including if the viewer skipped watching the Snap quickly. Snaps that appear in Spotlight can be from Snapchatters with private, personal accounts, or from Snap Stars with public profiles and millions of Subscribers.
Surfacing New Types of Entertainment
To help surface new types of content Snapchatters may be interested in, and mitigate against echo chambers, we’ve built diversity directly into the Spotlight experience. We work hard to make sure that our algorithms are developed with diverse outcomes in mind.
We do that a few ways, including by building our algorithmic models using diverse training data sets, and vetting our models for biases and discrimination. We also use “exploration” mechanisms to ensure that you see new and diverse entertainment in Spotlight. This approach distributes views more fairly to a broad group of creators. And, it teaches our algorithmic models that diversity and inclusion of different views should be part of their native function.
For example, if you show us in Spotlight that you really like dogs, we want to give you entertaining puppy Snaps to enjoy! But, we also want to make sure we’re surfacing other types of content, other creators, and other adjacent interest areas for you, like creators who focus on nature, videos about travel, or even just other animals.
Rewarding Creativity
Spotlight is designed to reward creativity in a fair and fun way, and we’re distributing over $1 million USD every day to Snapchatters. Snapchatters must be 16 or older, and where applicable, obtain parental consent to earn. The program will run through the end of 2020, and potentially beyond.
Earnings are determined by a proprietary formula which rewards Snapchatters primarily based on the total number of unique video views a Snap gets in a given day (calculated using Pacific Time) as compared to the performance of other Snaps that day. Many Snapchatters will earn each day, and the ones who create the top Snaps within that group will earn the most for their creativity. We actively monitor for fraud to ensure that we only account for authentic engagement with Snaps. Our formula may be adjusted from time to time.
To appear on Spotlight, all Snaps must adhere to our Community Guidelines, which prohibit the spread of false information (including conspiracy theories), misleading content, hate speech, explicit or profane content, bullying, harassment, violence, and much more. And, Snaps submitted to Spotlight must also adhere to our Spotlight Guidelines, Terms of Service, and Spotlight Terms.