The company is taking a new approach to marketing its TikTok-like Spotlight feed by partnering with Kim Kardashian West and her family in launching a new 'acts of kindness' initiative, which calls on Snapchat creators to share their own acts of kindness via Spotlight clips for a share in $100,000 prize money.
Snapchat explains as follows:

Starting today, Snapchatters can join Kim and Kris in submitting Snaps of their acts of kindness to Spotlight -whether that's whipping up a home-cooked meal for someone, cleaning up your community, or just surprising your loved ones with some unsolicited compliments. Creators worldwide have the opportunity to earn a share of the millions we put up every month for the best Spotlight Snaps. And to the US Snapchatters, submit to the #KindnessChallenge on the Spotlight Trending Page for your chance to win a share of $100 000 USD explaining how you spread joy by surprising a loved one with a compliment or random act of kindness!

With the effort, the organization aims to contribute to a boost in Spotlight take-up and positivity heading into the tail end of the year, which could be a great option considering the largely negative news stories over the previous 12 months. As Snapchat writes, it already has a funding program in place to encourage the creation of Spotlight clips, which first started at $1 million per day, distributed between the highest-performing clips, but has since been scaled down to 'millions per month'.

That shift has created an element of frustration among Spotlight producers, many of whom had grown accustomed to the support, but the program, as a whole, has contributed to an uptick in the adoption of the feature, which has gained in uploads and views steadily for twelve months.

Indeed, Snapchat reported back in April that 125 million people were viewing Spotlight content every month (Snap has 306 million daily active users in total), while in October, Snap reported that daily Spotlight uploads had more than doubled, quarter-over-quarter.

This latest push is another attempt to inject more interest in the format, and, as overall interaction with short-form video grows, it might be an effective means for Snap to maximize the format in the lead-up to the holiday season.

Interestingly, Snapchat has also published some new guidelines on how it will go about curating the clips that will share some of its Spotlight dollars.

In October, Snapchat launched 'Spotlight Challenges', which allows Snap to define specific activities and elements that users will record in their Spotlight clips, thus upping their chances of scoring a cut of the cash on offer in Spotlight.
Today, Snap outlines additional safety considerations around those clips:

"Unlike 'challenges' on other platforms, Snap's Spotlight editorial team curates each Spotlight Challenge. The team is focused on amplifying those trends that are positive, inclusive, creative and engaging as opposed to those that are harmful."

That's a direct shot at the controversy around some of TikTok's challenges, including the 'Milk Crate Challenge', which have lead to injuries and harm among participants.

Roughly speaking, Snap makes the Spotlight funding depend on how much supervision it gets over the content that users upload in the app. In other words, this does not mean that the users can upload whatever they want; but if you want also to share some cut of its funding, you need to care about safety considerations.

The push seems to make Spotlight a more positive, uplifting content experience, which should help it be more appealing to Snap users further, which in turn increases engagement. And maybe that will then keep more Snap users from migrating to TikTok instead, if Snap can provide a more entertaining and enriching content feed. The challenges are available to users in the US, though Snap notes that more markets will be able to take part "in the following months".