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.”
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