The Underline:
In Short: Snapchat is rolling out “Creator Subscriptions”, where Snapchatters can pay their favorite creators to get exclusive content, joining a tried-and-true practice gaining steam for social media apps.
So What: New spending habits in a mobile-first world open the door to monetizing parasocial relationships.
Globally we spent $15.7 Billion on social media apps in 2025.
This isn’t ad dollars or corporate deals. It’s you, me, your sister, your brother and we are paying dollars out of our wallets directly to TikTok, Snapchat, Telegram and X. We are tipping content creators, subscribing to new features and tools and paying to remove ads.
Snapchat is the latest to expand its offerings to include “Creator Subscriptions”, where Snapchatters can pay their favorite creators to get exclusive content. This adds to their existing offerings of one-off purchases and subscriptions: Snapchat+ allows you to access exclusive features like custom app icons, AI captions, Replays and Streak reminders. In 2025 alone, consumers globally had already spent over $810 Million on Snapchat+ subscriptions focused on features, according to Sensor Tower data.
If TikTok’s success with monetizing fandom for content creators is any indication, Snapchat stands to tap into a lucrative cash stream.
Why is This Consumer Spend a Big Deal?
The key here is:
Consumer spend on these features are split in two:
Paying Creators - while you love “Sandra’s” content and it feels like you are paying her, the payment first flows through the social media company (where they often take a platform fee - Snap’s is 40% - and includes the cut Apple and Google take as part of the App Store ecosystem) and the rest is paid out to the creator. But to the consumer, it feels like you are simply paying Sandra.
Paying the Company (e.g. YouTube) for Features: You are paying - typically a recurring subscription fee - directly say to YouTube to have an ad-free experience or to X to access premium features like editing posts and tools like Grok.
Either way this is additional revenue coming from people, not from ads.
Social media is no longer free, but it really never was.
We ‘paid’ with our eyes, attention and the silent deal we made to pass with our personal data. Data that built some of the most sophisticated advertising targeting on the planet. This data is so valuable that in 2025, 70% of digital ad spend went to Social Media Apps (that’s over $100B in the US alone).
Where Is This Spend Coming From?
The short answer, everywhere. But nearly half is coming exclusively from Americans and those living in China.
How Does this Fit Into the Larger Creator Economy?
The creator economy typically focused on brand deals and ad sponsorship. In 2025, Goldman Sachs estimated the creator economy to be worth $346 Billion USD, set to approach half a trillion dollars by 2027.
However, this fails to account for the fandom factor.
To date, consumers have directly spent over $24 billion in TikTok alone, according to Sensor Tower data, by supporting their favorite content creators and live streamers.
What Does This Tell Us About Attention?
Parasocial relationships can be stronger than brand affiliations. Academic studies show that parasocial relationships have a direct impact on followers adopting advice. We trust them, we like them, ‘we want to have a beer with them’. (Or for the increasingly non-alcohol Gen Z cohort, we’d want to be stuck in the airport with them).
Consumers are voting with their wallets. We are valuing these services. We like - and want - to spend our time, energy, and now, hard-earned cash on these people, their advice and the features that give us more tools for engaging with our community online.
In a mobile-first world, we are defining new spending habits. We now are paying directly in apps, and we are spending money because these apps have become load-bearing walls in how we work, create, communicate and make decisions.
This is where behavioral infrastructure is being made.
Follow the dollars, and you’ll see where influence, distribution and narrative power will follow.
These social media companies are recognizing the power of fandom, tapping into that, and providing a framework (through both new options and also restricted access) for a fee.
And the biggest trend for consumers at large? We are choosing to pay. And doing so in the billions of dollars every month.
That Snap 40% platform fee is brutal. Compare it with Substack taking 10% and writers keeping roughly 87 cents per dollar. Completely different proposition. The gap explains why creators are migrating. I ran the numbers here: https://sulat.com/p/substack-millions