There are so many social media platforms out there nowadays, that it’s almost impossible to be active on them all. And a lot of time, you don’t really choose your main platform; it's more like it chooses you.
So, if Snapchat is where you spend your time, you might be wondering how you can monetize your account. In fact, you might even be wondering if it’s possible at all—no one really hears people talking about the top Snapchat creators like they talk about top TikTok earners.
But, I bet you’ll be happy to know that you can indeed make money on Snapchat. The app itself has a few monetization methods you can take advantage of, and there are a ton of super effective ways to monetize your Snapchat subscribers through other channels, such as Whop.
Let's get into the nitty-gritty of Snapchat monetization so you can start earning money for all your snaps!
Is Snapchat still popular?
If you get the feeling Snapchat isn’t as relevant as it used to be, you’re not alone. It was made around 15 years ago and it always targeted a younger demographic, so the first wave of users already outgrew it. Despite that, there are still lots of people on Snapchat.
According to the Snap Inc. website, over 75% of 13-34-year-olds in over 25 countries use Snapchat—and that adds up to 422 million daily active users.
If you think that sounds like a big number, that’s because it is. There’s no need to pretend that Snapchat is the biggest social media platform out there, however, because we all know it isn’t.
But that doesn’t mean you should overlook it. If the audience you’re aiming at overlaps with Snapchat’s demographic, it has great money-making potential. Let me elaborate!
Can you make money with Snapchat?
Yes, you can make money with Snapchat. First of all, there are a couple of “official” ways you can make money right in the app, which I’ll get into in a second.
These can be useful to collect some pennies while you’re growing your audience, but let me tell you—it’s pocket change compared to the money you can make outside of the app.
The point is that your audience is the real moneymaker, and Snapchat is just a funnel for other ways of making money. You can take that audience anywhere you want.
By leveraging this simple but powerful truth, you can start setting up additional revenue streams and directing your Snapchat followers to them.
Want to sell merchandise? They'll love it. Want to sell extra content to your biggest fans? You can!
I’ll get into a few of the best ways to monetize your Snapchat audience later on. But if you’re thinking that selling stuff online sounds too complicated, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Every idea that I'll cover on this list can be made into reality using Whop, an ecommerce platform that specializes in digital products.
It’s free and quick to make an account, you can list as many products as you want, payments and instant fulfillment are completely taken care of, and you only have to pay fees when you make a sale, so there's literally zero harm in trying.
In other words, you can set up and try out a new revenue stream idea without any risk or any initial investment. Better yet, Whop creators earn much more money than Snapchat can ever offer, with many creators earning $10,000 a month and more.
Now, let’s have a look at Snapchat’s in-app monetization methods.
Ways to make money through the Snapchat app
If you’re used to working with other social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok, Snapchat’s monetization methods will probably seem a little lacking to you. But, on the bright side, they are simple and easy to use so you might as well try them out to see if they work for you.
Even if the majority of your income comes from outside channels, you might as well take the extra money Snapchat is willing to give you as well, because hey, why not?
1. Snapchat Revenue Share Program
Snapchat inserts ads between posts (a.k.a. Snaps) in Public Stories, generating ad revenue for the app. With the revenue share program, you can get a cut of this money.
It’s a pretty hands-off method in that you’re probably already doing everything you need to qualify for the program as part of growing your profile, so this is just free money.
Joining the program is pretty hands-off too since you don’t need to apply. If you meet the criteria, Snap Inc. will contact you instead.
Here are all the things you need to do to qualify:
- Have at least 50,000 subscribers
- Have more than 25 million views or 12,000 hours of view time over the past 28 days
- Post to your Public Story every day for 10 days
- Post at least 20 Snaps each day over the past 28 days
- Be at least 18 years old
- Follow the community guidelines and content guidelines
- Live in an eligible country (e.g the United States, the UK, or most of Europe)
- Comply with Snap Inc.’s monetization terms
I know that sounds like a lot of posts. While some of you are probably here because you already use Snapchat and want to know how to monetize it, there are likely also a few readers who are reading this to find out if it’s worth starting a Snapchat account.
If that’s you, you might not know just how fast-paced Snapchat is.
You think Tiktokers post too much in one day? They’ve got nothing on Snapchatters!
On this platform, people post lots of content in short amounts of time, including photos and video replies to comments.
So, posting a lot is something you’ll need to do whether you’re aiming for this program or not. Having 50,000 subscribers, on the other hand, is quite a big ask.
If you’re just starting out, that could take quite a while. For comparison, most of Instagram’s monetization methods require 10,000 followers.
Fortunately, even if you don't quite qualify for Snapchat monetization, you can already make good money as a content creator in other ways.
2. Paid Partnership Label
One of the most popular ways to make money on social media is through affiliate marketing, and luckily, Snapchat has some support for this. You can partner up with companies and people outside of the app and whenever you make sponsored content, all you have to do is add the “paid partnerships” label.
You can find it in the menus while you’re publishing your post, and anyone can add it, regardless of subscriber numbers or engagement levels.
Snap Inc. doesn’t provide a way for companies to find influencers but they do allow third-party partners to use Snapchat data for this purpose. If you have Snap Star verification on the app and you want to be found by partners like this, you need to make sure you have “Brand Partnerships” turned on in your profile settings.
On the app side of things, this is all you have to do when it comes to sponsored content. Everything else, such as negotiating your contract, getting your content approved, and getting paid will all happen through the outside channels you and your brand partners use.
Good news: If you're not quite sure how to get started with affiliate marketing, there's no better way than trying out digital dropshipping.
It involves advertising someone else's digital product, such as their whop, and getting a cut out of each sale made through your unique link. There's next to no work involved outside of making a few Snaps about the product and sharing that link.
3. Spotlight Rewards and Creator Gifting
To keep things up to date, let’s quickly address Spotlight Rewards and Creator Gifting. At the time of writing, these features still exist but they are about to be retired in January and February 2025, respectively.
Spotlight rewards let anyone with more than 1,000 followers submit qualifying Snaps to try and win a reward, while Gifting lets your followers send you gifts.
There’s no information at the moment about whether Snap Inc. is planning to rework these features or introduce some new monetization methods.
5 ways to make money on Snapchat
Now, let’s get to the real money makers.
Whether you have 5,000, 50,000, or 500,000 subscribers on your Snapchat account, each and every one of them is a potential customer. You just need to offer them something to buy, and that's easier than it might seem.
In this section, I’ll walk you through a few of the best ways to make money with Snapchat.
1. Sell merchandise
Starting off simple, merchandise is a great way to encourage your subscribers to become spenders. It’s something we expect just about any influencer or public figure to have, it can be easy to make, and it’s definitely easy to promote.
Your fans will probably flock to your merch website as soon as you announce it because everyone wants to support their favorite content creators and show off their love for you.
You can also involve your fans in the design process, holding logo-design competitions and taking polls to collect product ideas. Who doesn't love a good poll?
When you think of merchandise, you’re probably thinking about WordPress websites selling mugs and t-shirts (and you certainly can go that way) but it’s not the only option. Here are other ideas you can try out.
Digital merchandise
Not all merch needs to be physical. Depending on your brand and your content style, there could be multiple digital products that would work for you. For instance, if you’re a lifestyle content creator, you can sell digital stationery products like planners, journals, timetables, and organizers to help your fans emulate the lifestyle you post about.
For artists, you can sell digital prints, wallpapers, digital stickers, app icons, or even digital art commissions. If your content is connected to writing or you just have a lot of information to share, you can even create and sell ebooks.
There are all sorts of digital product ideas out there for you to try and possibly the best thing about all of them is how easy they are to sell.
Let’s say you have a few pieces of digital art you want to sell and you want to start taking commissions.
It's easy: just set up a Whop account, create a storefront, list your art, and create a system for taking commissions and communicating with customers all within a couple of hours. The best part is that you won't spend a penny.
When you make your first sale, Whop will take care of the payments and make sure your customer gets instant access to the art they just bought, and all you have to do is share a small percentage of that sale with the platform.
That means you don’t have to deal with product stock, shipping, packaging, or any of that complicated stuff. It really is about as simple and risk-free as it gets.
Print-on-demand merchandise
If you do want to offer t-shirts and mugs with your logo on them, there is a simpler way to go about it than working with a proper manufacturer.
Print-on-demand (PoD) sites like Redbubble let you upload the designs you want to use and choose the products you want to offer but when you make a sale, they are the ones who will make the product, package it, and ship it off to your customer.
There are a load of different sites to choose from with varying levels of quality and affordability and many different products to choose from. Some PoD sites will print your logo onto stationery, blankets, magnets, bags, shoes, soft toys, water bottles, and so much more.
Because they handle so much of the work, PoD sites tend to take a significant cut from each sale and that does eat into your profit margins. That's why you might be better off just selling the designs in your whop and letting people get them printed without your help.
Dropshipping merchandise
Not all merchandise has to be “here’s a product with my name on it.” You can also just provide your fans with a place to buy what they want, and that maybe means products that you enjoy and use a lot yourself (because not every product you like can be a sponsorship deal).
An easy way to do this is through dropshipping. If you don’t know what that is, you can read our guide to dropshipping right here, but basically, it’s all about working with a supplier to sell their products, with the supplier taking care of all the fulfillment.
Because dropshipping is so popular, there are suppliers for just about every product you can think of, so you can create a really audience-focused shop for your fans that sells whatever kinds of products they’re into.
Some dropshipping suppliers even offer personalized products, so if you work with the right companies, you may still be able to offer branded items through dropshipping.
2. Make extra content
Snapchat specializes in photo and short-form video content, which is totally fine—but what if you have ideas for a bigger project?
You might be able to turn it into a micro-episode structure and force it to work that way, kind of. But, it'd be a whole lot easier to just make the content you want to make and distribute it off-app.
The catch, of course, is that your fans need to pay for this extra content. To make this worth it for them, you need to make your extra content bigger and better than what goes on your Snapchat, and there are tons of different ways to do this.
Let’s look at some basic examples:
Cooking content
- Instead of recipe shorts, create full-length recipe videos
- Put together bundles of your best recipes
- Include written recipe cards with long-form content
- Post exclusive recipes inspired by fan polls
- Hold live cooking sessions on stream
Lifestyle/comedy content
- Create outtake reels and behind-the-scenes content
- Make longer videos, e.g. skits, product reviews, day-in-the-life, etc.
- Make a multi-episode series
- Do long-form collaborations with other creators
- Start a podcast
Educational content
- Post longer, more in-depth tutorials and explainers for your most popular topics
- Hold live Q&As with your fans (with paid entry)
- Bundle your best content in a logical order (i.e. beginner tips to advanced tips)
- Post exclusive real-time information (e.g about stocks or crypto)
If you make extra content, you’ll probably make a few different types and you’ll probably want to price them in different ways. Whop gives you ultimate flexibility and freedom when it comes to product types and product pricing.
You can charge a set entry fee for live events, charge a monthly fee for access to a regularly updated catalog of content, price products individually, and bundle them together.
With this much choice, you can make sure all the content you make is distributed exactly how you want. You can also give out discounts and host sales whenever you want to.
3. Start an exclusive community
If you’re already an experienced content creator, you know how much fans like being part of a community and having the chance to interact with you and your content. One great way to monetize this is to simply give your fans more ways to interact with you and each other.
Forget the comments section—you can create an exclusive community with a whop. In your whop you can host chat channels, live events, early access to new content, giveaways, and more for your fans to enjoy.
Exclusive communities are such great products because your fans can shape them to be exactly what they want. Seeing as they get to interact with you, they’ll tell you exactly what you need to do to make it better as soon as you ask (and, knowing people, even if you don't ask).
The monthly recurring revenue you get from a membership-based community is amazing. If you’re used to random payouts from in-app revenue, this will feel so much more stable and reliable.
4. Create online courses
A large number of influencers make content based on something they’re good at. It could be cooking, drawing, dancing, knitting, singing, writing, making clay figures, fixing computers … literally anything.
It doesn’t matter what your area of expertise is, if you have knowledge to share then you can charge people for it. One super easy way to do this is through online courses.
You might have noticed this, but online courses and educational resources are huge right now. It's a much more flexible way to learn, so it's no wonder that people love it. In fact, that's how I taught myself some programming a few years back.
As a seller, possibly the best part about online courses is that you only have to make your course once, but then you can sell it forever. You might want to add updates from time to time, but overall, they’re a perfect source of passive income.
Plus, if you are already a content creator with a specific niche, then you already know how to share knowledge and communicate new concepts to people.
Online courses are pretty flexible, too, so if you’re not that much of a writer, you can present your course in video form. Similarly, if you'd rather stay off-camera, you can use PDFs instead.
Length is also flexible. Not every course needs to have 10 modules with five hours of content each. You can also create short courses that teach you how to make a fancy meal, how to pick the right crypto altcoins to invest in, or how to draw a pixel-art house.
If you’re wondering exactly how online courses are made, there are a few ways you can do it, but if you want ease and consistency, Whop is the place to go.
Not only can you sell your courses through Whop, but you can also make your courses right on the Whop app.
You can upload documents, add text, upload audio or video, add quizzes and knowledge checks, and organize everything into lessons and modules. You can sell your courses individually, or if you have a lot of courses, you could create a subscription to let people access all of them (or even just some of them).
Basically, you have everything you need to make whatever kind of course you want and sell it however you like, all without leaving Whop. Talk about ease of use, right?
Because you add different built-in apps to your whop like chat rooms and video calls, you can also offer additional services like a Q&A space or a weekly webinar to make your course experience more immersive.
5. Offer one-on-one calls with your fans
Not every influencer makes content that can translate into an online course.
After all, some people focus more on being a social media personality, sharing their life and opinions on various topics. If that’s you, the most valuable thing you have to sell is your time and attention.
There’s also some good timing involved here since Snapchat is getting rid of its gifting feature, leaving fans with no easy way to get close to their favorite creators. You can fill this void by offering one-on-one video calls with your subscribers.
Pricing these calls can feel tricky. You don’t want to ask for too much because that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths, but you also don’t want to sell yourself short. And let's be real—if you were to talk to every single follower, you'd never have time for anything else.
The best thing to do is think about how many calls you want to do a week and how much money you want to make overall. You can also do a bit of competitor research to see what other influencers with the same subscriber count as you tend to charge.
Offering calls is one of the most involved ideas on this list since you’ll have to put in multiple hours of work each week to pull it off.
On the one hand, the high-effort nature of this means you can charge more money and increase your profit margins. On the other hand, you might be limited if you don’t have a lot of free time.
You can schedule times, collect payment, and host the call all from your whop. If you want to expand your offerings a little, you can also host giveaways and polls to give all of your fans a reason to visit even if they can’t afford a private call.
Technically, you could combine one-to-one calls with any of the other ideas on this list.
You could even create a whop that incorporates every single idea on this list, from selling digital merchandise to running your own exclusive community. It’s a pretty powerful platform.
Pros and cons of making money with Snapchat
So, how does Snapchat compare to other platforms overall? Let’s look at some pros and cons.
Pros
To put it bluntly, the platform doesn’t really matter all that much. If Snapchat is where your audience is, then Snapchat is the best place for you to be.
You might not get that much out of the app itself, but honestly, isn’t that the case with every platform? There’s a reason why every YouTuber has some alternate streams of revenue, and it's because YouTube ad revenue just doesn’t generate that much money.
Funneling your audience to places where you can sell them products and services is something you can and should do regardless of the social media platform you’re using.
So from that perspective, Snapchat is just as good as any other platform. If Snapchat users respond to your content, then keep posting—it really is that simple.
Cons
Having said all that, when it comes to official monetization methods, Snapchat is a bit limited. Because of this, there are some situations where it isn’t really worth it.
For instance, if you’re just starting out in the social media space and you’re choosing your first platform, Snapchat probably isn’t the best one to choose.
Bigger platforms like Instagram and TikTok will give you access to bigger audiences and more robust monetization features.
If you’re running a business that’s aimed primarily at older adults, Snapchat is likely not the best platform for you either. It’s mostly used by younger people, after all, although the age range is now wider than it used to be.
What’s the best way to make money with Snapchat?
I’ve hinted at this already, but the best way to make money on Snapchat is to grow your account and then sell products and services to your audience.
These sales will happen outside of the app, but you’ll promote your products and interact with your fans on Snapchat in order to convert them into customers.
And I'll let you in on a secret: this isn’t just the best way to make money on Snapchat, it’s the best way to make money on any social media platform.
It doesn’t matter how robust the official monetization methods are, selling additional products to your audience always has infinite earning potential. Ad revenue isn't as endlessly scalable as the ability to make and sell your very own products.
Besides, you don’t have to drop out of Snapchat’s revenue share program or stop posting sponsored content if you don’t want to. You just need to supplement whatever you’re already doing with additional products and services.
Make money on Snapchat with Whop
Every influencer is different, creating their own content in their own ways. Because there’s so much variety out there, you need an ecommerce platform that can handle all these possibilities.
A platform where you can monetize your Discord server, sell ebooks, host live events, offer memberships, and interact with your fans all in one place.
Whop is that platform.
You decide exactly what your storefront does and doesn’t offer, so you can put all of your products and services in the same place, instead of sending your Snapchat subscribers to five different websites depending on what they want to buy.
This makes it super easy to funnel your audience to your products and maximize your sales.
Speaking of maximizing those sales, if you want to reach even more people, you can add your whop to the Discover page. Millions of people browse the Whop Discover page, so it helps new people find your store and learn about your products.
Whop is different from all other methods of making money on Snapchat (or any other social media platform). It's different because it's flexible and it's 100% you.
You pick what you do, you choose how much to charge, and you decide how much time to invest. We're just here to help you make it happen.
Sign up with Whop and start making money on Snapchat today!
