According to an announcement made on Tuesday, over 250 million people view Instagram Stories every day. This is a 25 percent increase since April when Instagram’s 10-month-old clone of Snapchat’s Stories feature hit the 200-million-user mark. In this case, while Snapchat’s daily audience growth has struggled to surpass single-digit percentages, it would seem that Stories’ daily audience growth has really picked up the pace.
Ever since the announcement that was made in October that 100 million people viewed Stories daily, the company has added 50 million new daily viewers every three months. But since then, the action has increased even more, since Stories gained 50 million new viewers in just two months. This could be due to the network effect that comes with having an overall daily audience of over 400 million people and slotting the Stories feed atop the app’s main screen.
For Snapchat, their daily audience growth has slowed down to the single digits since Instagram copied one of the main features in August 2016. Snapchat’s overall daily audience was surpassed by Instagram Stories, which has topped 166 million people in the first quarter of 2017.
To make Stories viewership grow even more, Instagram gave people more ti view within Stories. Instagram added an option for people to live-stream themselves last November. The broadcasts would appear within viewers’ Stories feed, but only while the broadcast was airing. When the stream ended, the chance to watch it was over. But not anymore.
If somebody wants to rewatch the broadcast, people are now able to share a replay of their live stream for up to 24 hours. Not only that, the likes and comments that people posted during the live stream will also replay, according to a company blog post announcing the replay option. Users who were watching a replay will be able to fast-forward for 15 seconds at a time by taping the right and left sides of the screen. These viewers can even send messages to the broadcaster using the “Send Message” button, which even appears in non-live Stories.