Snapchat Should Start Paying Its Users, Investor Hunter Walk Says

As an early product leader at YouTube, Hunter Walk saw the video-sharing site go from 100 million video views per day to four billion. As it grew, it also started to make money — and it chose to share that money with video creators.

Now it’s time for Snapchat to follow suit, Walk said on the latest episode of Re/code Media with Peter Kafka. Hot mobile apps won’t be hot for long, he argued, if they can’t give their everyday users a good reason to keep making content.

"The most important thing that YouTube has done, that Vine, Instagram and Snapchat haven’t done, is figure how to let people make money directly from their videos," Walk said.

Before YouTube, Walk worked on "Late Night With Conan O’Brien" before moving west to join Linden Lab, the company behind the once-hyped virtual world Second Life; from there, he moved on to Google AdSense and then YouTube before becoming a venture capitalist in 2013 as one of the founders of Homebrew. He said venture capitalists "need to be in it for the long haul."

"It’s never been easier to become a VC, but in the next few years, it’ll never be harder to stay one," Walk said. "I have a three-year-old fund and a four-year-old daughter. I won’t know what I have until they’re 10."

Listen to or download the episode in the audio player above. And make sure to subscribe to Re/code Media with Peter Kafka on iTunes, which you can do right here. You can also find the show on Stitcher and TuneIn. We’ll have a new episode next Thursday.

Want more podcasts? Okay! Try Re/code Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, which you can subscribe to here. Or there’s Too Embarrassed to Ask, hosted by Kara and Lauren Goode from The Verge, which will have a new episode tomorrow. Click here to subscribe to Too Embarrassed to Ask on iTunes.

Finally, don’t miss Re/code Replay, where we’ve posted audio from Peter’s Code/Media 2016 conference. To subscribe to that, click right here.

You can follow @Recode on Twitter for the latest on upcoming guests.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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