Previously, only brands and Snap Stars could include links in their profiles, according to TechCrunch. Instagram also recently made it easier to link out to other places, letting you add up to five links to your profile.
Snap, Inc., the company that owns Snapchat, started beta-testing a revenue-sharing program last year called Snap Stars, where it injects ads into videos and splits the revenue with its creators.
Since April, it’s opened that program up to all eligible creators, and some creators are apparently doing quite well, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Adam Waheed, a creator with 12 million subscribers on YouTube, joined the program in February and said he now earns six figures a month posting on the platform.
Does this episode of The Vergecast feature several of the world’s best-known rappers? That depends on how you define “feature,” which turns out to be a pretty thorny question. This episode definitely features laser bongs and Snapchat bots, though. But not blue checkmarks or Netflix DVDs. None of those anymore.
Other than the My AI chatbot launch, the most interesting thing at Snap’s Partner Summit today was definitely the AR mirrors. The company thinks you might use it in a store to try stuff on, or just goof around while you wait for your friend to check out. It all seems very early, but pretty fun.
Also... AR vending machines are apparently a thing now.
After seven years at Snapchat, I finally learned the truth about why our most important apps seem destined to disappoint us.
A tidbit from the latest edition of my Command Line newsletter: Snap plans to unveil its AR-for-enterprise effort at its annual developer summit in April or possibly sooner, company sources tell me. The idea is for apparel brands to use Snap’s virtual try-on tech and 3D asset management to facilitate AR shopping on their sites.
This would be a totally new source of revenue for Snap, which needs to find more ways to make money if it wants to win back skeptical investors.
[The Verge]
Snap just reported its earnings for the third quarter and the numbers are mostly in line with what Wall Street was expecting. Daily users reached 363 million, a 19 percent increase that is much better than growth rates for Facebook and Twitter. Revenue only grew 6 percent to $1.13 billion and Snap remains unprofitable.
Snap invented the Stories format but now it’s saying that users are engaging less with their friends’ Stories, which is a problem for its business since ads are placed between Stories. The company laid off 20 percent of its employees recently in an attempt to cut costs and get to profitability faster.
In a leaked internal memo, CEO Evan Spiegel explains how Snapchat aims to pick itself back up after getting “punched in the face hard.”
