Instagram Stories, the Snapchat clone that is designed to let Instagram users share what they’re doing with their followers, now has 500 million daily active users, Facebook announced during its latest earnings call on Wednesday. The latest benchmark is roughly half of Instagram’s total user base of over a billion users and is significantly increased from 400 million daily active user count reported back in June last year.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the earnings call stated that the feature continued to grow at a fast pace. The executive also highlighted the Stories format, which got expanded from Instagram to Facebook’s native social networking platform and the Messenger app as well as reached to WhatsApp in the form of Status, is aiming to monetise “at the same levels” as the News Feed.
“Instagram just passed 500 million daily actives on Stories,” said Zuckerberg, 34, in the earnings call.
Instagram Stories was launched as an integrated feature on the photo-sharing platform back in 2016. The initial aim of the feature was to enable Instagram users to share multiple shots or videos into a single video that can be shared with followers. This was similar to how people share their memories on Snapchat. However, Facebook of late started using Stories to generate some revenue.
In March last year, Instagram Stories got support for full-screen ads. The Menlo Park, California-headquartered company also in June enabled a shopping feature on Stories to enable companies to sell their products through creative stories.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in the earnings call underlined that Instagram Stories generated over 25 per cent of new customer sales for Washington DC-based online custom picture frame maker Framebridge. Sandberg also highlighted that companies such as Cetaphil used Instagram Stories to target their customers and increased their store sales. “Today, we’re also announcing that 2 million advertisers are using Stories to reach customers across our family of apps. We’re making it easier for advertisers to adapt their campaigns for Stories,” she added.
While Stories across all its products emerged as a strong source of revenue, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg emphasised that there are plans to bring new products to bring “major improvements to people’s lives.” He highlighted that WhatsApp Payments, which is currently at its testing stage in India, is set to be rolled out to some more countries this year. Private sharing in Groups and Stories is also set to become more central to the overall Facebook experience, the executive stated.
