Instagram Stories is benefitting from the large active user base Instagram itself enjoys, and now has 100 million daily active viewers. That’s two-thirds of the daily active user population for Snapchat, which reported 150 million global active users across its entire platform in late September. Even with a built-in audience to build from, and prime real estate positioning at the very top of Instagram’s user interface, the rapid pace of its adoption is impressive.
The new stat comes from a Buzzfeed report that also reiterated the total of monthly active users across Instagram at a high of 500 million (a number it first released in June), halfway to that coveted 1 billion mark Facebook Messenger passed earlier this year.
Instagram has been around for slightly longer than Snapchat, as a six-year old company compared to Snapchat’s five, but the quick uptake of a new feature that differs dramatically from the existing Instagram experience definitely indicates that the photo-focused social network hit on a customer need when it introduced the feature. Typically, new features introduced by Facebook on its platform are initially greeted with skepticism by users who prefer the comfort of things they already know well, so early eagerness around Stories is a good indicator that it’ll continue to do well in the future.
Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told BuzzFeed that the company had initially thought about approaching ephemerality by adding a checkbox option to posts should users want their content to expire after a certain amount of time, but didn’t think that would work because of the added step involved.
The growth for Instagram is great, but it doesn’t necessarily mean bad news for Snapchat, either. While the features it designed are definitely inspired by Snapchat, it’s not necessarily the case that Snapchat users are abandoning that platform and coming over to Instagram instead (at least not en masse). As analyst Ben Bajarin notes above, the growth Instagram is experiencing is probably additive overall to the category.
