On March 31, Snapchat will host the inaugural Snappy Awards at its Santa Monica headquarters, becoming the latest major platform to build its own awards show from scratch, complete with nominees, categories, a celebrity host, and a lifetime achievement honoree, DJ Khaled. The show, which will span 21 categories recognizing creators across entertainment, comedy, music, sports, beauty, fashion, and gaming, represents Snapchat’s most visible effort yet to position itself as a serious player in the creator economy. 

Comedian and Snapchat creator Matt Friend will host, and the nominee list reads like a who’s who of the platform’s most active faces: David Dobrik, Khloe Kardashian, JoJo Siwa, Catherine Paiz, and Landon McBroom are all up for Creator of the Year. In the music category, Alex Warren, fresh off a 10-week run atop the Billboard Hot 100 with “Ordinary,” competes alongside two-time Grammy winner Leon Thomas, rapper JT, singer ENISA, and Shenseea. Other categories feature nominees like media executive David Bullock (known by his nickname “Alaska”), Kylie Jenner and NFL wide receiver Tyreek Hill.

The categories themselves tell a story about what Snapchat values, or at least what it wants to be known for valuing. Alongside traditional honors like Best Storyteller and Breakout Creator of the Year, the Snappys include craft-focused awards like Best Use of Creative Tools and Top Lens Creator, platform-specific metrics like Spotlight MVP, and a category called Off-Platform Buzz, which essentially rewards creators for making Snapchat content that people talk about elsewhere. Vertical-specific awards cover food, gaming, fashion, beauty, sports, and athletics. It is a wide net, cast deliberately.

Jim Shepherd, Snapchat’s head of content partnerships, framed the event as recognition of the creator community’s growing influence. “The Snappys Awards Show is a reflection of how powerful the creator community on Snapchat has become,” said Shepherd. “The Snap Stars we’re honoring aren’t just entertaining audiences–they’re driving conversations, building businesses, and shaping culture. This show represents our long-term commitment to giving creators meaningful recognition and real opportunity as they continue to define what’s next.”

The decision to give DJ Khaled the event’s first Lifetime Achievement Award is the kind of choice that makes perfect sense. Before Instagram Stories existed, before TikTok was a global force, Khaled was the most entertaining person on Snapchat, with his captivating stories and absurd sense of humor. His most legendary series of snaps involved him narrating getting lost on a jet ski journey after coming home from Rick Ross’s house, accompanied by his usual motivational commentary.

Khaled used Snapchat the way the platform always hoped people would: as a place for raw, unscripted moments rather than polished content. The platform says the award recognizes his lasting impact as a creator, artist, and entrepreneur. Khaled’s most recent album, God Did, came out in 2022, he has leaned other aspects of entertainment. He signed a nine-figure deal with Influence Media Partners last year that includes TV and film development alongside an investment in his music catalog. He remains a figure whose career was meaningfully shaped by how he used Snapchat early on, and the platform clearly wants to remind people of that connection.

The Snappys arrive in the middle of a race among social platforms to create their own award shows. TikTok held its first U.S. awards in December at the Hollywood Palladium, handing out 14 awards in a live ceremony hosted by La La Anthony. The event had some setbacks, including LED screens that malfunctioned for part of the night, but it drew big names as presenters, including Paris Hilton and Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles, and it furthered the use of traditional, live awards shows for digital platforms.

Instagram took a different approach. In October 2025, it launched Rings, which honors just 25 creators annually with physical gold rings designed by Grace Wales Bonner and digital gold halos around their profile pictures. Rather than a live show, Rings operates more like a juried prize, with a selection panel that included Spike Lee, Marc Jacobs, and Instagram head Adam Mosseri..

YouTube has featured its play button system for years, awarding physical plaques when channels hit subscriber milestones. But those are automatic and based on subscriber numbers. What TikTok, Instagram, and now Snapchat are doing is qualitative and curated, which makes the awards function more like marketing than pure celebration. Each show is a testimonial for why creators should invest their time on that particular platform.

Snapchat saw more than a 40 percent year-over-year increase in creators posting content during the last quarter of 2025, driven in large part by its Snap Star monetization program. The company also recently launched a Subscriptions product that lets fans pay creators directly, following a model established by YouTube and Twitch. The Snappy Awards are a showcase for those initiatives, a way to present Snapchat as a place where creative work can become a career.

As platforms become more interchangeable and creators increasingly distribute their work everywhere, these award shows serve a specific strategic function. They create platform-specific narratives. They give creators a reason to feel loyal, or at least to feel seen. And they generate the kind of coverage and conversation that keeps a platform in the mix when a creator is deciding where to post next. Snapchat is certainly setting itself apart with the Snappy Awards and establishing itself as a creator-first platform. A full list of Snappy nominees is available here.

James Lewis

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In May 2023, Olivia Maher posted a short TikTok video of a plate of bread, cheese, grapes, and pickles. She explained that someone online had pointed out how medieval peasants survived on bread and cheese and called it miserable, and that she found this baffling, because that was basically her ideal meal. She called it “girl dinner,” or alternatively, “medieval peasant.” The video collected over 1.5 million views and videos with the caption or hashtag “girl dinner” have billions of views. Another creator, Karma Carr (@karmapilled on TikTok), set the concept to a catchy original sound, and the whole thing took off from there. Maher later described girl dinner as a meal doe when she was eating “bits and bobs” of items from her fridge (like cheese, pickles and salami, for example). The phrase appeared as a clue on Jeopardy!, which Maher watched live with her family and posted about in a video she described as the “cherry on top” of girl dinner’s first year. It entered the Merriam-Webster lexicon discourse and became shorthand for a whole philosophy of eating: low-effort, single-serving, no performance required. So what happened to the person who started all of it? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Maher, who works in television, has since jumpstarted the “House of Maher” weekly podcast with her sisters Adrianna, who works in human rights and Ilona, an Olympic rugby player. Ilona became one of the most visible athletes on social media during the 2024 Paris Games, telling People Magazine at the 2024 Olympics that Olivia was “the inventor of Girl Dinner” and also “my manager, my boss, my everything.”

That manager role is not just hyperbolee. Olivia is based in Los Angeles and handles much of the business and logistics behind Ilona’s career, which has expanded rapidly over the past two years. She was in the crowd at Dancing with the Stars when Ilona competed in late 2024. She was also in England when Ilona signed a three-month deal with Bristol Bears in the Premiership Women’s Rugby league at the start of 2025, drawing a club record crowd of over 9,000 to her debut match. 

In March 2025, the three Maher sisters launched House of Maher, a weekly podcast through Wave Sports and Entertainment.. The show, which Samsung Galaxy signed on as exclusive launch partner for, has released over 40 episodes since launch and holds a 4.9-star rating on Apple Podcasts. The dynamic is loose and personal: they discuss pop culture, dating, sisterly conflicts, and whatever comes up in the group chat. They have hosted guests including Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles. The show has become a significant piece of Olivia’s public identity, shifting her from “person who coined a phrase” to one-third of a media operation.

Outside of the podcast, Olivia has continued making food and lifestyle content on TikTok and Instagram, pivoting to full-time social media work. She hosted a brief video series called Girl Dinner with a Chef for Cherry Bombe magazine, visiting chefs like Susan Feniger to see how they approached the concept. She was also listed as a speaker at ADWEEK House during Cannes Lions 2025, where she was billed as a creator who “crafts engaging food and lifestyle content while managing the demanding business and life of her professional athlete sister.”

In November 2025, Olivia ran the New York City Marathon as part of Team Maybelline, finishing in 5 hours, 17 minutes, and 9 seconds. It was her first marathon. Ilona cheered from the sidelines holding a sign that read “Girl Dinner, Running Winner.” The House of Maher podcast dedicated an episode to the recap, in which Olivia discussed the experience with their parents. The NYC marathon set a world record that year with over 59,000 finishers.

Most recently, in February 2026, Olivia and Adrianna attended the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina as part of the Team USA Creators Program. In an interview with Olympics.com, Olivia talked about exploring Italian cuisine, citing Venetian spritzes, pasta, and bowls of olives as her version of Italian girl dinner. She and Adrianna described themselves as “full-time female fans,” there to support athletes across disciplines while their rugby-playing sister sat this one out.

The internet has a short memory, and most viral creators fade quickly once the trend cycle moves on. Maher has avoided that, partly through luck (having a sister whose fame skyrocketed at the exact right time), partly through work (managing Ilona’s career is a full-time job), and partly through a willingness to keep showing up without pretending to be anything other than what she is: someone who likes snack plates and takes her role as oldest sister seriously.

James Lewis

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Viral Twitch streamer and artist PlaqueBoyMax has restarted his notorious “Song Wars” competition after leaving it dormant for nearly a year. Earlier Song Wars runs in 2024 and 2025 helped establish the series as a regular stop for underground rappers looking to test unreleased tracks on stream. The new “Rising Stars Edition” of the series has artists play their unreleased music for a panel of judges. The first iteration was certainly a memorable one. The contest, where artists tried to impress a small room of judges and gain new listeners has contestants joining a video call live while their track is played and scored zero to ten. Notably, contest and previous “In The Booth” guest 2Slimey left the show early after a poor response to his music. Here’s how the stream went down, and what’s next for Max in 2026.

Over the past year Max shifted some of his focus away from streaming and toward his own music career. He still streams regularly, and has many brand partnerships, including recent streams with Nike in London for example. But Max has also jump-started his own music career. In May 2025, he formally announced a joint deal with DJ Zack Bia’s Field Trip Recordings and Capitol Records and began focusing on touring and promotion. Max also recieved praise by probably being the first Twitch streamer to be nominated for a Grammy. He was nominated for Best Dance/Electronic Recording for his production on the song “Victory Lap”, a collaboration with Fred again.. and Skepta. Max spoke about the nomination on stream and in interviews, describing how he first heard the news while he was live and then watched the clip circulate across social media In mid-March, Max announced that Rising Stars Song Wars would return with updated rules.

In the Rising Stars stream, which aired three days ago on March 15th, Max tells viewers he invited thirteen artists and that each one will play one song while judges score from zero to ten in a single night competition. He also says he intends to repost the records on his own channels, through playlists and SoundCloud uploads, so the songs keep moving after the stream ends. With a focus mainly on the underground, the Rising Stars lineup included BabyChiefdoit, BabyFace E, 1300Saint, Teezus, Slayr, alongside lesser known artists like Bleood, Chucky, Sk8star and 2Slimey. The judging panel gave this competition more reach than a typical Twitch stream. Multi-platinum producer Southside, DJ Akademiks, BruceDropEmOff and ImDontai all joined Max on the panel. The show aired live on PlaqueBoyMax’s Twitch channel and later appeared in full on YouTube, allowing viewers to watch the entire competition after the stream ended.

Most coverage after the stream focused on 2Slimey’s appearance and exit. Known for his auto-tuned, heavily distorted music, the Oklahoma-based rapper was polarizing for the panel. During Rising Stars, he played his track “New Swag,”. Almost the entire panel gave him zero out of ten, with Akademiks as the only judge willing to go as high as five. 2Slimey then left the call after hearing the mostly negative feedback. Reaction content framed that moment as the main story from the stream, replaying and commenting on 2Slimey’s segment, although Chicago rapper Lil Noonie also received low scores from some of the judges. Several creators uploaded dedicated reaction videos to the Rising Stars stream, focusing on the judges’ scores for 2Slimey and replaying the moment he left the call. Slayr, from Philadelphia, won the competition and received praise and positive feedback from the judges.

Song Wars now operates at a different scale than it did when it first helped build Max’s profile. He comes into this version as a working rapper with label support and streaming numbers, not just as a Twitch host sorting through submissions. Artists still show up because the room can move them into playlists, social posts and writeups that would take longer to reach on their own. Outlets such as The Fader and NPR have since profiled Max’s streams and competitions, treating Song Wars and In The Booth as central to his rise from Twitch into wider hip‑hop coverage. The Rising Stars competition shows that this mix of risk and opportunity remains in place, and it shows that Max still wants one strong song, played once in front of the right crowd, to matter.

James Lewis

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