How Snapchat made a comeback and won back users and advertisers

Hi, this is Amanda Perelli and welcome back to Insider Influencers, our weekly rundown on the business of influencers, creators, and social-media platforms. Sign up for the newsletter here.

In this week's edition:

• How Snapchat made a comeback and the key moments in its turnaround

• How YouTube creators are using Amazon's live shopping feature, Amazon Live

• The pitch a self-published author sent to Instagram influencers to get free marketing

• And more including the top fitness influencers on TikTok and how much a YouTuber with 50,000 subscribers makes per month.

Snap is on a growth tear. Here's how the once flailing company got advertisers to fall in love with it and reversed a sales slump.

Snap has won back users and advertisers after a rocky start as a public company.

The company has expanded its ad formats and cozied up to creators to try and dial up the amount of time users spend on the platform.

Tanya Dua, Lara O'Reilly, and Dan Whateley spoke with 22 people close to Snap to chart the key moments in its turnaround.

Catering to advertisers was an important part the company's comeback. But Snap has also made recent efforts with the influencer community.

Here are some changes Snap made to appeal to creators:

• The company has staffed up its talent management team, hiring people like Brooke Berry, who had run social media for the creator-event company VidCon.

• Snap also ramped up its outreach to influencers and their talent managers and agents.

• During the company's investor conference in February, Snap said it planned to bring ads to Spotlight, its TikTok rival, in the near future.

Snap reported its biggest quarter as a public company in the last three months of 2020. It brought in $911 million in revenue, up 62% from the year-ago quarter. And it blew past analyst estimates.

Looking forward: Snap has reversed its user growth slump, and social-media creators and advertisers are giving the app a second look.

Read more on Snap's comeback here.

Influencers are using Amazon Live to make money from shopping livestreams as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok eye the market

YouTube creator Carla Stevenné streams on Amazon Live every weekday.

Amazon Live creators share products with viewers and then earn a commission from every sale. Stevenné said she makes more money there than on any other platform.

I wrote about the live shopping feature, and how it works:

• Some influencers who got their start on YouTube are now exploring Amazon as a new platform for growth and revenue.

• The main problem: Creators often have to rely on promoting their Amazon livestreams on Instagram or YouTube where they already have an established following.

• The market is heating up. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are all eyeing live shopping and partnering with major retailers to help them compete.

Have more information on live shopping? Email me: aperelli@insider.com.

Read more about Amazon Live and how influencers are using it here.

How an influencer self-published a poetry book and used Instagram to market it and drive sales

Lesley Silva is a self-published poet and influencer with about 11,000 Instagram followers.

She used Instagram and influencer marketing to share her poetry and drive sales.

Sydney Bradley spoke with Silva about the self-publishing process using Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and how she used influencers to market her book:

• To get this marketing plan going, she started with an email pitch.

• Each email followed a similar structure and included a personalized introduction, telling the influencers why she wanted to share the book with them.

• Since January, she's sold about 270 copies on Amazon and made $1,150 through royalties (after Amazon's cut).

Read the exact email pitch she sent to influencers here.

Meet 28 of the most popular fitness influencers on TikTok

Researchers compiled a ranking of the biggest TikTok fitness influencers.

Popular Crossfit athlete Demi Bagby ranked highest for average likes per post, at 14 million.

Molly Innes broke down the 28 top fitness creators on TikTok (ranked by average likes per post):

• Dutch fitness coach and influencer Antonie Lokhorst averages 4.4 million likes per TikTok post. He signed with Body & Fit, a Netherlands-based fitness company, as one of its athletes.

• French fitness influencer Justine Becattini, who goes by the name JuJu Fitcats, sells a range of clothing items, ranging in cost from $7 for a pencil case to hooded jumpers at $47.

• Cassey Ho has run Blogilates, her pilates-focused YouTube channel, since 2009. She averages 2.3 million likes per TikTok post.

Read the full list of fitness influencers here.

More creator industry coverage from Insider:

YouTube

• A YouTuber with about 50,000 subscribers breaks down how much she earns per month from personal-finance videos (Amanda Perelli)

• How much money nano influencers make on YouTube and Instagram (Amanda Perelli and Sydney Bradley)

• How much YouTube pays influencers for 100,000, 1 million, and 150 million views (Amanda Perelli)

Media kits

• 10 real media kit examples that influencers use to get brand sponsorships (Amanda Perelli, Dan Whateley, and Sydney Bradley)

• A YouTube nano influencer shares the exact 8-page media kit she uses to get brand deals and what she earns (Sydney Bradley)

Media news

• New hires at XX Artists and A3 and investors pouring millions into livestreaming startups (Dan Whateley)

• Why an esports company just bought one of TikTok's most influential talent firms (Dan Whateley)

• 19 media startups that VCs say are poised to take off in 2021, as trends like newsletters and sports betting surge (Ashley Rodriguez and Dan Whateley)

This week from Insider's digital culture team:

Art history can help explain the hype around NFTs, the crypto collectibles that made Grimes millions

Alec Recinos wrote that non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have quickly become one of the fastest growing trends in the digital market.

NFTs are confusing, but viewing them in the context of the history of art helps explain how they create value and may impact artists and creators.

NFTs offer creators like Grimes (who recently made millions by dropping NFTs) to more established contemporary artists the ability to quickly make a lot of money by hopping on a new trend.

Read more on how art history can explain NFTs here.

More on digital culture:

• Squishmallows went viral in 2020 growing in popularity on TikTok and Reddit, becoming Gen Z's Beanie Babies.

• TikTok's biggest star Charli D'Amelio said she's grown tired of posting and has "lost the passion" for TikTok because of negativity.

• 45 influencers and celebrities who partied hard during the pandemic, flouting public-health guidelines.

Here's what else we're reading:

• YouTube star Trisha Paytas has become immune to cancellation in a way that only a handful of people can do successfully (Rebecca Jennings, from Vulture)

• How the founder of RewardStyle taught social-media stars how to monetize their brands (Jo Piazza, from Town and Country)

• Influencers are coming up with new ways to make money, but fans still hold the power (Taylor Lorenz, from The New York Times)

• Inside YouTube's anonymous tea and drama channels (Sandra Song, from Vulture)

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