Photo-messaging app Snapchat on Tuesday launched its new entertainment platform 'Spotlight' for user-generated content in India.

According to the company, Spotlight collects the most entertaining snaps from the Snapchat community all in one place and will become tailored to each Snapchatter over time, based on their preferences and favourites.

With over 5 billion snaps created each day, Spotlight aims to empower the Snapchat community to express themselves and reach a larger audience in a new way.

Spotlight has been designed to entertain the Snapchat community while living up to the snaps' values, with their wellbeing as a top priority. Spotlight content is moderated and doesn't allow for public comments. Snaps submitted to Spotlight must respect the content guidelines to receive distribution.

Snap's $1m a day programme will also be available in India, celebrating and rewarding the creativity of local Snapchatters and offering a chance for creators to earn a share of a $1 million daily fund.

Snapchat had launched in-app Spotlight in November last year to take on Chinese short-video making app Tiktok. Spotlight is a dedicated place within Snapchat where users can watch short, entertaining videos backed by music in a vertically scroll, TikTok-like feed.

Snapchat had grown to over 100 million monthly active users in January.

Apart from India, Spotlight is now available in Mexico and Brazil, having launched in 11 countries previously (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France).

As per a report in December, homegrown short-video making apps led by Josh captured 40% market share of their Chinese rival TikTok after it was banned by the Indian government in June. 

TikTok had nearly 85 million users in India in June 2018, which nearly doubled to over 167 million users by June 2020, when a ban was imposed on the platform over national security concerns.