Inside Snapchat’s plan to court—and grow—the next generation of creators

There’s a lot of chatter about TikTokers and Instagrammers these days, but not as much about Snapchatters. Jim Shepherd, director of global content partnerships at Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., is working to change that.

Shepherd’s job is largely to recruit creators to Snapchat, pitching them on features like the platform’s revenue-sharing program, which was extended beyond Snapchat Stories to the platform’s Spotlight feature late last year.

“One of the things that I hear from creators all the time is that brand deals are awesome,” he said, “but they also really feel that the platform sharing revenue with them is really important.”

Snap seems to be banking on brand deals and revenue sharing to boost its creators, as well as its own revenue. In 2024, the company paid out more than half a billion dollars to creators and media partners. It’s also continued investing in new features for creators and brand partners, like its Snap Star Collab Studio, which helps brands find creators and turn organic content into paid media. At its NewFronts presentation last month, Snap announced new features for brands and creators, like the ability to send Sponsored Snaps. On Thursday, the company announced even more new features, including a lasting content archive for public creator profiles and the ability for creators to view insights like average Spotlight view times and views broken down by traffic source.

We spoke with Shepherd about how Snapchat is working to position itself against other platforms and become a creator generator in its own right.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Snap has been coming up with new offerings for creators and advertisers looking to work with creators. How are you positioning Snapchat against other social media platforms?

That’s something that people ask me a lot. “How do you go out and convince creators to invest their time in this platform?” I think Snapchat is one of the best ways to reach Gen Z, if not the best way. And we talk about the audience and reaching roughly 90% of Gen Z in over 20 countries. We talk about the content as a place where creators can be themselves…But I think maybe the most powerful part is the business part. We’ve quietly put together a very amazing place for creators to build a business, and it started with the Story revenue-share program where they can post their Story, we insert ads in Stories that are long enough, and we share revenue directly with the creator…I think there’s this feeling that Snapchat invented Stories and then a lot of other platforms adopted Stories, and so Stories are Stories are Stories on all these different platforms. When we inserted ads into Stories and started sharing revenue, I think it really created a whole new format where [creators] aren’t using Stories on Snapchat like they do on other platforms. They’re really vlogging. One of our Snap Stars, Gianna Christine, she’s getting like 10 minutes of time spent on average in her Stories.

With creators posting more vlog-like content, are you viewing YouTube or longer-form platforms as more of a competitor than a platform like TikTok?

I think if you asked creators, they really don’t see these platforms as the same. Snapchat is definitely an “and,” not an “or,” and we don’t advocate for people to get off other platforms. But when I talk to a lot of content creators, especially ones who blow up on a short-form video platform, so many of them tell me that they want to funnel their fans to a place that they can monetize. So if you’re a person that blew up on TikTok, for instance, you can imagine wanting to go to YouTube to make more longer-form content that’s supported with revenue share. What we’re starting to see on Snapchat with Spotlight and with Stories is that we really have both. Creators are going to Spotlight to build an audience…and then on Stories, they’re deepening their engagement with their fans, and they’re making money, and they’re almost vlogging, but in an easy way, where they don’t have to get expensive equipment and they don’t have to edit long videos.

With TikTok’s future still uncertain, is Snapchat doing anything to position itself as an alternative to creators?

One of the things that I think is underreported is that over the last several years, we have had an extremely high hit rate of getting people that blow up on TikTok to come to Snap, starting with the D’Amelios…Noah Beck is maybe the most famous male TikTok star in the US, and he posts on Snap probably every day. Alix Earle is probably the most famous TikTok star to blow up since the initial wave, and she posts on Snap all the time…Regardless of what’s happening with TikTok, we’ve seen this march for a really long time…The one thing that we’re a little bit later to the game on is…homegrown stars that we did not recruit to Snapchat, that we did not call, and we did not find on TikTok or Instagram or because they have a hit show, we literally found them on Spotlight. Ella Moncrief is a creator who is in her 20s, studying to be a pilot, and we didn’t recruit her to Snapchat. We found her on Spotlight, and she grew from 2,000 followers to more than a million…If you think about what made TikTok culturally relevant in the beginning, it was the emergence of homegrown stars, and we’re starting to see that on Snap, too.

Are you doing anything to help support homegrown stars grow their followings on Snapchat?

We did our first-ever creator week not too long ago, where we flew 10 or so of these homegrown stars to Los Angeles. We brought them to campus, introduced them to our sales team, introduced them to brands, and had a media dinner. Jessica Gardner, who is one of our homegrown stars, is a Division I pole vaulter, and she was covered in TMZ…I think we’re starting to see some of these creators emerge into pop culture.

What have been some successful tactics in recruiting creators from other platforms?

One thing is Snap School, which we launched about four years ago and have done hundreds since all over the world, from LA to Paris to Riyadh to Mumbai. For a really long time, we would talk to creators one-on-one and invite them to the office and do an onboarding meeting. We still do that, but we started to realize that if we created an event at our headquarters and we invited 100 creators or so and we taught them best practices, it created this environment where they really learned how to succeed on the platform and could meet each other and they really like the community that we’ve built…We’ve even started to allow brands to sponsor Snap Schools. Clinique sponsored one of our Snap Schools recently, and it was great for them because they had branding on the screen, and the whole auditorium was filled with our Snap Stars who have millions and millions of followers combined.

Snap’s latest earnings report showed that Snapchat now has more than 900 million monthly users. Do you feel like focusing on creators has contributed to that growth in users?

I definitely think that we’ve seen a growth in cultural relevance…There’s been a lot of chatter about [Snap] in the creator world for a few years now, and I feel like the world is starting to almost take notice…But the growth isn’t just with content. One of the powerful things about Snapchat is, people are [coming to Snapchat] first and foremost to talk to their friends. On top of that, they’re starting to see creators that they care about. The combination of friends and well-known creators is super powerful, and then if you throw in this other ingredient, which is you’re starting to see people who are not famous but who are homegrown stars that just started to emerge, and they’re young people that maybe are more close to where you are in your own life, and you’re starting to see them blow up, I think that is even more of a motivator to not just come into the app to watch content, but to start making content.

Looking ahead to next quarter, how much is Snap banking on creators as a continued growth and revenue engine?

This is a space that we’ve invested in for a long time…Something that I know that we’re working on is enhanced insights for creators so they know more on the back end.

What other areas of opportunity do you see?

We’ve recently talked about slightly changing the content experience to bring Spotlight more to the forefront for discoverability…Another journey that we’re on is on the viewer side, showing the right content to the right people. So if you love cooking content, you can see our Snap Stars that are chefs, or if you love sports content, you can see our NFL content…That’s something else that we’re super invested in.

You’ve been at Snap for 10 years. What do you hope for the company and its work with creators and advertisers over the next 10?

With these tools that we’ve continued to roll out, I think the goal [is to have] advertisers of all sizes being able to work directly in the app, to connect with creators of all sizes, to be able to reach an audience of any size, whether you’re Coca-Cola and you want to reach millions of people or you’re a local business and you want to work with smaller creators to reach a smaller audience. Really empowering all kinds of advertisers to do any kind of a campaign—I think that’s where we’re headed, and what we get really excited about.