When Kylie Jenner teased her King Kylie cosmetics drop earlier this month with a 24-hour exclusive campaign on Snapchat (complete with a nostalgic dog filter), it felt like a full-circle moment. After her early Snaps helped turn the app into a hub for celebrity, influencer and brand content, Jenner’s off-hand 2018 tweet asking, “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?” wiped roughly $1.3 billion from the company’s market value in a single day. Does Jenner’s return signal a comeback — not just for her beauty brand, but for Snap Inc itself?
Despite its lingering reputation as a teen messenger app, over the past few years Snapchat has been reinventing itself. In June 2025, Snap Inc announced a suite of creator tools: globally available templates that turn saved Snaps (aka Memories) into full-screen video compilations, new “Top Content” and “Total View Time” metrics for public creators, and deeper insights to support paid-content opportunities. These sit alongside the company’s growing monetisation framework, from ad-revenue sharing for creators with more than 50,000 followers and 25 million monthly views, to payouts on Spotlight, its short-form video feature that functions like TikTok’s FYP, rewarding creators whose clips go viral.
There’s also the recently launched Creator Collab Studio, which connects talent directly with brands for sponsored campaigns. These initiatives have seen creators, who are looking for new ways to monetise their content, return to Snapchat, positioning it for a comeback as a content platform as well as a messenger. The app is courting creators to get there: in September, Snap invited roughly 30 London-based creators to Snap School to show off these new tools. One of the attendees, Hannah-Louise Farrington, a fashion and lifestyle creator with 60,000 Instagram followers, says she wasn’t sure her content had a place on the app.
This could begin to change. “If enough creators start doing something different, there can be a cultural shift,” Farrington says. “And because there’s now such a financial incentive, that shift might actually happen.”
“The momentum is huge,” says Julie Bogaert, head of creator partnerships for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Snap Inc. “With people coming back, even the ones who were still a little bit like, ‘Oh, I’m not sure if it’s still for me, I feel a bit too old,’ they all want to be on Snap again. So it’s an exciting time for us right now.”
For those wanting to reach younger audiences, Snapchat’s got them. According to Snap’s own data, 75 per cent of its users are aged 19 to 34, and the monthly active user base exceeds 930 million globally. For comparison, TikTok and Instagram have 1.5 billion and two billion monthly active users. Already high-profile figures such as Maya Jama, Amelia Dimoldenberg, Central Cee and Heidi Klum are active on the platform, posting Stories to their followers. It’s also drawn campaigns from American Eagle, which used Snapchat’s location-based features to entice users to stores, and Cartier, which created an AR try-on experience for its centenary Trinity ring last year.
The question, still, is whether this revival marks a genuine new frontier for influencer marketing, or simply another nostalgia-based trend.
“Creators are experimenting more on the platform because Snap has finally made monetisation feel tangible. Shared ad revenue from story feeds, new sponsorship formats and creator education have turned it from a ‘nice to have’ into a viable revenue stream,” says Thomas Walters, chief innovation officer and co-founder of creator agency Billion Dollar Boy. “That said, brand deals on Snap still lag the big three — Instagram, TikTok and YouTube — so agencies are being selective about how they use it.” Walters references industry data showing that two-thirds of Snapchat’s Gen Z user base buy at least one product per month on the platform. “That tells us there’s a powerful commerce signal bubbling up again,” he adds.
Snapchat’s second act
The Snapchat landscape has changed since the days of its viral filters. While the app still opens to the front-facing camera, navigation flows through three main verticals: swiping left reveals Chat, where users message and share disappearing Snaps; swipe right and you enter Stories, a mix of friends’ updates, celebrity posts and curated brand channels. Scroll further and you’ll hit Spotlight, Snapchat’s vertical video feed where anyone can surface content to a wider audience, much like TikTok’s FYP. Overlaid throughout are Snap Map (for location-based discovery), Lenses (for AR try-ons and filters), as well as a growing set of shoppable links and ad placements.
For makeup influencer Florence Robertson, who has 1.8 million followers on TikTok and nearly 30,000 on Snapchat, the platform’s value lies in this intimacy. Robertson used Snapchat casually for over a decade from 2014, mainly to message friends, but began posting content in earnest two years ago. “I think the main thing with Snap is that it’s so different from other platforms in that it is so current,” she says. Unlike her other channels, where videos are edited or curated, Robertson says Snapchat feels refreshingly spontaneous and that the algorithm favors more daily posts, not fewer.
“It’s the main platform I go on when I’m not feeling pressured to create or come across a certain way,” Robertson explains. “This morning, I dropped my full glass of matcha on my sink and it went absolutely everywhere. That’s the type of thing I would normally not post elsewhere because I try to maintain a certain image. But on Snapchat, that’s exactly the kind of thing I want to post.”
So far, Robertson has partnered with YSL Beauty and Prada Beauty on the platform, posting the collaborations to her Stories and Spotlight, where her audience can see her testing and reacting to products in real time. “The Stories ones are my favorite because they genuinely feel like part of my day,” she says. “For a Prada ad I did on Stories, I was just chatting about some of my favorite perfumes, it felt like I was sharing part of a story rather than doing an ad. It makes sense within the flow of everything else I’m posting, and because people on Snapchat really want to see your everyday life, it feels like something they genuinely want to watch.”
TikTok content
Robertson hasn’t yet reached the 50,000-follower threshold required to monetise Story views through Snap’s in-app revenue-share program, but says she’s working towards it, noting that the potential earnings per view are higher than on TikTok, where creators reportedly earn around $600 per million views, compared with around $1,000 per million on Snapchat.
For Bogaert, who spent six years at Instagram before joining Snap, the latter’s appeal lies in its refusal to perform for the feed. “I was already feeling this fatigue that people were having posting on other platforms,” she says.
This plays out through the app’s design features. In addition to being greeted by the camera, there are no likes or comment sections. Users are met with a space that feels conversational and personal — closer to messaging friends than broadcasting to an audience. “People tend to use Snap as a messenger first, and then they stay to watch content,” Bogaert says. “It’s like in real life: you see your friends, you feel good and then everything else flows naturally.”
This directness — what Snap internally calls “camera-first communication” — has made the platform fertile ground for creators looking to rebuild credibility with audiences who are burnt out by overcurated feeds. A key feature, Story replies, reinforces that one-to-one feeling. Anyone can reply to a Story, and creators can choose to repost those replies to their own Stories with a visual response. “It helps deepen engagement because you have that dialogue, but it’s private,” adds Bogaert.
For brands working with creators on the platform, direct dialogue offers something different to the other spaces they advertise in. “Creators have built such trust with their communities that when they talk about a product they genuinely use, it feels organic and real,” Bogaert continues.
Bogaert has seen luxury brands shift away from static, campaign-led marketing and towards real-time storytelling, where brands are comfortable letting creators share behind-the-scenes content rather than a polished final image. She references a Balenciaga partnership, where approval was left entirely in the hands of those creating content. “Usually, heritage houses want to review every single post,” she says. “This time they said, ‘OK, cool — we trust this girl,’ which to me was like, wow.”
AR becomes a gateway to brands
If cultural capital has returned, Snapchat’s business strategy hinges on turning that attention into commerce through augmented reality. The company’s AR network now delivers more than 400K AR creators have created lenses which have been viewed more than 4.5 trillion times, and as AR glasses are expected to reach mainstream markets in 2026, Snap is banking that the camera itself will become the new storefront.
Snapchat’s infrastructure, which opens on its camera rather than its feed, lends a first-mover advantage as social commerce enters its next evolution. According to a 2021 study by Deloitte Digital and Snap Inc, “By 2025, nearly 75 per cent of the global population — and almost all people who use social apps — will be frequent AR users.” Meanwhile, the global AR market is expected to reach $599.58 billion by 2030, registering a compound annual growth rate of 39.7 per cent between 2025 and 2030, according to Grand View Research.
Nike recently integrated Snap’s AR Mirrors into its New York stores, allowing shoppers to virtually try on items, interact with digital displays and unlock discounts by scanning products. L’Oréal has tested face-tracking lenses that let users visualize skincare routines or experiment with makeup virtually. Tiffany Co used Snap’s AR technology at the US Open, where visitors could interact with digital, diamond-covered tennis racquets and trophies.
“What’s interesting for brands when they start thinking of AR early on is that they tap into an audience that perhaps doesn’t have the purchasing power yet to get the £3,000 Balenciaga bag,” says Bogaert. “By using AR, they can try entry-level products and develop a relationship with a brand that they might be too scared of going into the shop for.”
As AR becomes embedded in everyday devices, from smartphones to glasses, the influencer’s role is evolving alongside it.
“Snap’s new smart glasses could be a turning point. If they unlock authentic, first-person storytelling and allow creators to capture the world through their own lens — literally — then we could see brands jumping at the chance to build experiences around that,” says Billion Dollar Boy’s Walters.
“If Snap can connect that hardware innovation to its growing creator monetization and AI-driven ad tools, we could absolutely see a second act,” he says. “The signals are there: a committed Gen Z audience accustomed to social commerce, maturing ad tech and creators who are eager to experiment again. The question now is whether Snap can sustain momentum and prove ROI [return on investment] in order for marketers to make it a permanent line in their media plans.”
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