In another blow to media-sharing app Snapchat, rival app Instagram just reported 250 million daily active users of Instagram Stories feature. If you remember, Instagram Stories itself is a rip-off of Snapchat Stories. Originally Snapchat started the novel feature where people could post a series of images daily that disappeared after 24 hours.
Facebook’s global head of sales Carolyn Everson revealed the staggering number in an interview. If you think about it a year ago when we sat together, Instagram Stories didn’t exist,” Everson told CNBC. “Today on the platform, we not only have 250 million people using it, but actually a third (of the most viewed stories) are businesses using Instagram Stories and one million are advertisers.”
Whats more, Snapchat has 166 million users as declared by Snap itself. The company started the feature way back in 2013. Later, Instagram copied the feature in August 2016. . In fact Everson mentioned the total Instagram users stand at 700 million.
Whats more alarming is that Instagram added up the numbers much faster than Snapchat. While we must admit, the feature was a copy, we also have to say the feature is better in some ways than Snapchat’s version. For example, followers & non-followers can see stories. Instagram has an arguably easy to use interface. Instagram provides the ability to see the series of photos in a story and so on. Instagram’s greatest advantage is perhaps its big user base. It remains to be seen what strategy Snapchat comes up with to counter Instagram’s growth.
