Snapchat’s Influencers Are Fleeing to Instagram for Money

Wes “Wuz Good” Armstrong has almost 700,000 followers on Instagram, enough to get paid six figures a year to promote Lexus cars and Axe body spray there. It’s easy, he says, to put products in his comedy and stunt videos for an audience that will still like and comment on the posts as long as they’re entertained.

Snapchat makes things a lot tougher. Armstrong has followers there, too, but he doesn’t know exactly how many. And because of the way the service works, it’s hard for him to track how many people watch the sponsored messages he sprinkles into his posts. To capture the audience for a recent video for Toyota Motor Corp., he had to set an alarm on his iPhone for 23 hours and 59 minutes after the post to remind him to take a screen shot of the number of viewers. He was cutting it close: Like most Snapchat posts, the video disappeared at the 24-hour mark, taking his proof with it. He makes a lot less money on Snapchat—maybe $10,000 a year, he says, if he’s lucky.