Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel attends the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Media & Technology Conference at Sun Valley Resort on July 9, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
snap As social media companies look to diversify beyond advertising, they’re introducing a subscription feature that lets creators earn recurring revenue directly from their most loyal fans.
The Los Angeles-based company exclusively told CNBC that it will begin testing its “Creator Subscriptions” feature on Monday, starting with a small group of Snapchat creators. As user growth slows, Snap’s expansion into paid creator subscriptions underscores the company’s efforts to grow revenue beyond advertising and build a more predictable revenue stream.
“Subscriber growth will be a key metric for tracking our progress over the next year,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said earlier this month as part of the company’s fourth-quarter results.
Snap’s existing subscription services, Snapchat+ and Memories Storage Plans, grew 71% year-over-year, reaching 24 million users during the same period. However, the company reported 474 million daily active users, down 3 million from the previous quarter.
The upcoming feature will allow Snapchatters to pay to subscribe to their favorite creators and receive exclusive content, including direct photos and videos, as well as access to subscriber-only Stories and the ability to send text-based responses that can be featured at the top of a creator’s public Stories.
“We want the next step in a creator’s long-term monetization journey to be rooted in real relationships,” Jim Shepard, Snap’s head of content partnerships, said in an interview with CNBC. “And we’re expanding the ways creators make money in a predictable way, helping them make money from their most loyal fans.”
Snap is entering the increasingly crowded direct-to-fan subscription market.
While platforms like Patreon, Substack, and OnlyFans are built around paid memberships, major social media companies are introducing their own in-app subscription tools. In 2018, Google YouTube now offers channel memberships. With channel memberships, creators receive 70% of membership income after taxes and fees, and transaction costs are covered by the company. in 2020 and 2022 respectively. meta According to the company’s website, Facebook and Instagram have started allowing creators to offer subscriptions, and Meta is now allowing creators to keep 100% of their subscription revenue, excluding fees.
Snapchat will allow creators to set their own subscription prices ranging from $4.99 to $19.99 per month. After deducting platform fees, creators receive approximately 60% of subscription revenue. Snap said it will provide creators with performance data to guide pricing decisions as the product evolves beyond the initial testing phase.
Snap’s initial group includes 15 creators, with about 10 more expected to be added in the U.S. during early testing. The company said relief efforts are also underway in Canada, the United Kingdom and France. Participants include popular creators like David Dobrik, Catherine Paiz, Harry Jowsey, Jeremiah Brown, and Skai Jackson.
“We’ve built a place where their income feels really rewarding, consistent and sustainable,” Shepherd said. Creators “consistently say it’s a great place where you can make a living being yourself.”
Snapchat creators currently earn money through Stories and Spotlight ads and brand partnerships under the company’s unified monetization program.
Shepherd said Snap’s advantage lies in distribution and discovery through the company’s Spotlight feature, which shows other users’ short-form videos on the app.
“We have a distribution engine built in, and a lot of creators are building fandoms,” Shepherd said.
In the coming weeks, this feature will be available to users in eligible countries using Apple iOS devices. Creator subscriptions won’t be available to Android users initially, but the company hasn’t said when that will change.
Watch: CNBC’s full interview with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel
