'Viral Snapchat Stars' Are Making Up To $100,000 A Week Doing What You Probably Do For Free
We all know that since the dawn of social media, plenty of people have figured out how to monetize their personal brands and make real money.
But how does that work on Snapchat, where the draw is that whatever you create disappears within seconds? Can anyone actually harness that platform and profit?
Time's Laura Stampler has discovered that it's possible. She profiled Jerome Jarre, one of Snapchat's first truly viral stars, to figure out how he figured out how to use the app to his advantage.
Jarre says he used to be big on Vine with over 6 million followers, and swapped to Snapchat about a month ago. He maintains his knack for creating funny content that revolves around pranks and improv comedy in the real world.
Jarre, who has 1.2 million Snapchat followers, says that the new medium is building his portfolio from 6-second videos to 2-minute narratives and increasing his followers. (Snapchat launched a Story feature in October that allows users to create a longer narrative that is displayed to all of their friends, rather than directly send to select followers, that lasts a 24-hours and can be viewed multiple times.)
After 18 months on Vine, he had accumulated 800,000 Instagram followers. After three weeks on Snapchat, that number grew 1.3 million. Jarre shared his Story statistics, showing his zany narratives - "that always end with a positive message" - get viewed upwards of 1.1 million times and screen grabbed upwards of 43.9K times.
Here's one of Jarre's Snapchat Stories - based around the World Cup:
Young people who "get" Snapchat are extremely valuable to advertisers. Time reports that consulting for big corporations can earn Snapchat stars up to $100,000 a week.
"Why anybody thought that a disappearing piece of content isn't valuable is insane to me," Vayner Media founder Gary Vaynerchuk told Stampler.
To read Time's full report on viral Snapchat stars, click here.