It’s been eight months after Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories, and now, the cloner has now officially become bigger than Snapchat.
It was announced by Facebook, the owner of Instagram, that over 200 million people are using Instagram Stories everyday. Snapchat averaged 158 million daily users in the fourth quarter of 2016. Of course, this figure could have grown since this information was disclosed by Snap Inc. back in February 2017.
The 200 million number is a continuation of Intstagram’s trend of adding about 50 million million daily Story users every three months. The feature counted more than 150 million daily users in January 2017, up from 100 million in October 2016. Instagram’s figure even means that half of their 400 million daily users are checking out the Stories feature that appears on the top of the app’s main screen, as well as the Explore tab. This is the same ratio that Instagram reached in January.
Not only has Instagram over taken Snapchat’s user count, it is aso taking some more of its rivals features to both Stories and Instagram Direct, its private messaging feature that was updated to be more Snapchatty earlier this week.
Now people are able topin text, emoji and stickers to particular 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
You can even create your own stickers as well. Just tap a smiley face icon to take a photo of an object, and you can place it anywhere onto a photo or video. These particular stickers are being dubbed by Instagram as selfie stickers since the idea is to take photos of them selves, then convert them into stickers. But really, you can take a photo of anything and turn it into a sticker. This is already possible on Snapchat, but with Snapchat, you can trace out the sticker, and on Instagram, the selfie sticker has to be circular.
Now, more people are able to use geostickers that are customized to the city where a person is at the time of the image. Since geostickers rolled out in New York and Jakarta, Indonesia, last month, Instagram finally added ones for people in Chicago, London, Madrid and Tokyo to add to their photos and videos. This is possible for Snapchat, although not for folks in Chicago, Jakarta, Madrid or Tokyo.