Instagram Stories now has 200mn daily active users, which is more than Snapchat

Shares of Snapchat-owner Snap fell 1.2 percent on Thursday after rival Instagram, owned by Facebook, said more than 200 million people a day use its Stories feature, which competes against Snapchat.

Snapchat had 161 million daily active users at the end of last year, ahead of Snap’s March initial public offer, which was the largest by a technology firm in three years despite decelerating user growth.

Instagram Stories’ daily active users announced on Thursday amount to an increase of 33 percent from the 150 million daily active users it had in January.

The Instagram feature, which launched last year, lets users and businesses post a string of photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours, similar to Snapchat.

Facebook last month introduced an update to allow users to tweak photos on their smartphones with visual details like a rainbow or a beard of glitter, also similar to Snapchat.

Snap surged in its public listing but has struggled since then.

The stock on Thursday fell 23 cents to trade at $19.99 (roughly Rs. 1,300). It is down 26 percent from a record high close on March 3, but remains up 17 percent from its $17 per share IPO price.

The company on May 10 will announce its quarterly results for the first time as a publicly listed company and is expected on average to have lost $193 million (roughly Rs. 1,244 crores), according to Thomson Reuters data. Snap has warned it may never become profitable.

Reuters

Publish date: April 14, 2017 12:46 pm| Modified date: April 14, 2017 12:46 pm

Facebook is building a better Snapchat than Snapchat, and that’s very disturbing

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Facebook is big. With almost 2 billion users, it’s the largest social media platform in the world. Each of its social media properties are also massive in their own right. Instagram boasts of 600 million active users, Messenger just crossed the 1.2 billion mark and WhatsApp has more than 1 billion users.

By any measure, Facebook is the largest, most successful social media company on the planet. That still doesn’t stop Facebook from copying its competitors when it runs out of ideas, however. In fact, this might very well be the secret to Facebook’s continuing success.

Take Snapchat for instance; an app for sharing ephemeral images and photos caught the attention of the younger audience that Facebook wanted but couldn’t net. Facebook’s solution to the problem? Outright plagiarism. The social media giant has been copying Snapchat’s features with utter disregard for any sense of propriety, and it’s been doing this very successfully for years.

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Snapchat Stories is a feature that allowed users to share chains of content that can be viewed in a 24-hour period. This was introduced in 2014 and proved to be the most popular feature on Snapchat, some might even call it a defining feature today.

Facebook blatantly copied Stories and implemented it across almost all its properties, including Messenger and Instagram. Better yet, we’ve now learnt that Instagram Stories on Instagram is actually more popular than Snapchat Stories on Snapchat. With 200 million daily active users on Instagram Stories, Snapchat in comparison manages about 160 million daily active users.

Taking things a step further, Facebook has introduced a number of tools to improve Stories. This includes selfie stickers, pinned stickers, video Stories, more geo-stickers, etc.

This is all well and good, and I’m not debating the morality or business ethics of the issue, but I do wonder if Facebook has a real plan. It’s easy to copy something that’s already proven to be successful, especially if you have the means to improve upon it; the iPhone and its innumerable Chinese clones is testament to that.

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However, while Facebook not only copied the feature, it also tried to implement it everywhere without regard for the audience the feature is targeting. What’s the point of having Stories on Facebook, Instagram as well as Messenger? Doesn’t Facebook know where it’ll work best?

Facebook is behaving like a chef has this great new sauce that he wants everyone to try, but he doesn’t know which dish it’ll go with. Rather than making the effort to figure it out, he adds the sauce in everything and hopes to sort it out later based on feedback.

That’s not an indication of a chef who knows his trade, is it? Taking this analogy a step further: If the best restaurant in the world thrives on stolen recipes, what happens when there are no more recipes to steal?

One does have to feel sorry for Snapchat. While Snapchat is busy innovating, Zuckerberg is busy peddling his manifesto on building global communities and working on newer advertising techniques. And when Facebook just casually steals all of Snapchat’s hard work, what can Snapchat do but grit its teeth and move on?

More importantly, once Snapchat dies, who will Facebook rip-off next?

Publish date: April 14, 2017 11:42 am| Modified date: April 14, 2017 12:46 pm

Instagram Stories to now get advertisements in order to boost revenues

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  12 Jan 2017 , 10:50

Facebook Inc’s Instagram is bringing more than 30 advertisers into one of its fastest-growing features, Instagram Stories, in a bid to boost advertising revenue, the company said on Wednesday.

The social media company will become a more important player in maintaining Facebook’s growth in advertising revenue in 2017. During the last two earnings calls, Facebook executives said they may soon reach a limit on the amount of ads they can place in front of users, which had been one of the key factors driving ad revenue growth.

Media buyers are optimistic about Instagram’s ability to maintain Facebook’s place, second only to Alphabet Inc’s Google, in the digital ad marketplace.

“Instagram could end up being as strong a revenue component for Facebook as YouTube has been for Google,” said Noah Mallin, head of social for North America at ad agency MEC.

In Instagram Stories, users and businesses can post a string of photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. It launched in August and now has 150 million daily active users, according to Jim Squires, director of market operations for Instagram.

The new ad product will show full-screen ads intermittently as users swipe through photos and videos on Instagram Stories. The company is testing it with major advertisers including General Motors Co, Nike Inc and Airbnb, which is using it to promote its product Trips on Airbnb.

Time Warner Inc’s Turner Sports will test ads for cable network TNT’s airing of next month’s National Basketball Association All-Star Game in New Orleans.

Companies normally test new advertising products with a select group of advertisers to work out any kinks before a wide roll out.

According to eMarketer, 74 percent of US companies plan to use Instagram this year, up from 53 percent who used it for marketing in 2016. This level of use would allow Instagram to surpass Twitter.

“It’s definitely gained importance,” said Ian Schafer, founder and chairman of ad agency Deep Focus, who said he plans to spend more money with Instagram.

The past few months have seen Facebook admit to a variety of errors in how it has measured performance for brands that advertise on the platform. Buyers do not expect that to hurt Instagram’s efforts.

“They just have such a monopoly when it comes to attention that it’s difficult not to have to go that route,” said Victor Pineiro, senior vice president social media for digital agency Big Spaceship.

Reuters

Instagram now has 600mn users; last six months saw 100mn new users

By tech2 News Staff /  16 Dec 2016 , 11:29

Popular photography focussed social media network Instagram has just announced that it has reached 600 million users. Of this number, around 100 million users were added just in the last six months.

Thanking its users on its blog, Instagram release said, “You now have more ways to share than ever before with Instagram Stories, live video and disappearing photos and videos in Direct. Additionally, with updated safety tools that give you more control over comments and other parts of your experience, we’re working to make Instagram safer than ever for connection and self-expression.”

This number is also double that of its user base in 2014. Instagram which was bought by Facebook back in 2012 for $1bn, which was a huge amount of money at the time, has been seeing exceptional growth as compared to other social media networks. Its numbers are more than double that of Twitter, almost three times that of Snapchat. In Facebook’s bouquet of properties, Instagram is still behind Messenger, Facebook and WhatsApp.

Earlier this year, in May, Instagram completely redesigned its logo and added a black and white theme to the app. Since then, we have been seeing a lot of updates being added to Instagram, a lot of the more recent ones just lifted from Snapchat.

It has added features such as Live Videos and messages, which also disappear – just like Snapchat. Instagram Stories was another feature that was added on earlier this year – again, something that Snapchat has been doing for quite a while now. It has added Saved Posts as well. People clearly seem to be loving these features.

Instagram update brings links, tagging friends and built-in Boomerang in stories

By tech2 News Staff /  11 Nov 2016 , 09:36

Facebook is known to constantly tweak features on its products, and the latest is Instagram that adds not one but three new features to Stories. So, users can add URL links to their Stories, add mentions ‘@name’ in a friend’s story and add a Boomerang directly without the need to create it separately on a Boomerang app. Boomerangs are short video clips that loop back and forth.

To begin with, the ability to add URL links would means with a single click you will navigate to the web page that has been linked. Users will find ‘See More’ links at the bottom of the stories, which will allow verified accounts to add links. Techcrunch explains that the’see More’ button instead of actually seeing links will keep the photo free of ugly links while still allowing one-click access to them. Moreover, Instagram will block inappropriate links. As aforementioned, Instagram is testing it with verified accounts and may later expand to others too.

The second feature Mentions will let you tag a friend in a story using @. So, you take a picture or video for a story add text and tag a friend using @name. Instagram will also autocomplete the user names. “You’ll receive a notification in Direct when you’re mentioned in someone else’s story. Just tap the preview to go straight to the story for as long as it’s live. If someone you don’t follow mentions you, you’ll see the notification in your message requests,” Instagram writes in a blogpost.

Finally, Instagram will let you take Boomerang directly inside Instagram. So, swipe from your feed to open stories camera and a new format picker under the record button will allow users to select Boomerang mode. Once users tap on record, the camera will stitch together a burst of photos into a mini video that will play forward and backward. Users can then share it to their stories.