Instagram Stories tops 200M daily users, now bigger than Snapchat

Instagram’s eight-month-old Snapchat clone is now bigger than the original and adds several more new Snapchatty features.

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Eight months after Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories, Instagram’s clone is officially bigger than Snapchat.

Every day, more than 200 million people use Instagram Stories, the Facebook-owned photo-and-video app announced on Thursday. By comparison, Snapchat averaged 158 million daily users in the fourth quarter of 2016, though that figure may have grown since the app’s parent company Snap Inc. disclosed it in February 2017.

The 200-million mark continues Instagram’s trend of adding around 50 million daily Stories users every three months. In January 2017, the feature counted more than 150 million daily users, up from 100 million in October 2016. The 200-million figure also means that half of Instagram’s 400 million daily users check out the Stories feature that appears atop the app’s main screen, as well as its Explore tab; that’s the same ratio that Instagram reached in January.

In addition to overtaking Snapchat’s user count, Instagram is also taking some more of Snapchat’s features to both Stories and Instagram Direct, its private messaging feature that was updated to be more Snapchatty earlier this week.

Now people can pin text, emoji and stickers to specific spots or objects in their videos, like a ? on the head of an actual cat, and the text/emoji/sticker will stick to whatever object it’s pinned to. That’s already possible on Snapchat.

Now, people can create their own stickers by tapping a smiley face icon to take a photo of an object that they can stick into a photo or video. Instagram dubs these selfie stickers because the idea is that people will take photos of themselves and convert those into stickers, but it’s possible to take a photo of anything and turn it into a sticker. That’s already possible on Snapchat, though on Snapchat you can trace out the sticker whereas on Instagram the selfie sticker must be circular.

Instagram SelfieSticker

And now, more people can use the geostickers that are customized to the city where a person is. After rolling out geostickers in New York and Jakarta, Indonesia, last month, Instagram is adding ones for people in Chicago, London, Madrid and Tokyo to add to their photos and videos. That’s already possible on Snapchat, but not for people in Chicago, Jakarta, Madrid or Tokyo.

Instagram Geosticker


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Tim Peterson
Contributor
Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.

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