According to an Instagram spokesperson, more than 100 million people are viewing Instagram Stories everyday, but clarified that the 100 million users mark that was reported by BuzzFeed on Thursday referred specifically to the number of people viewing Stories.
For anything to get an audience of over 100 million is a big thing. For TV, as an example, only big events like the Super Bowl see this kind of audience. With Instagram’s rivalry with Snapchat (it was actually Snapchat that Instagram copied the Stories feature), it means that Instagram’s two-month-old version has two-thirds the the audience that Snapchat gets on a daily basis.
Even though 100 million is a huge number, something that has to be kept in mind is that it represents only a third of the 300 million people that check Instagram every day. What this means is that two-thirds of Instagram’s daily audience swipe past the Stories that are in the user’s main feed.
So if only a third of Instagram’s audience is looking at Stories, why shouldn’t we just write it off? There are four reasons:
- Facebook owns Instagram, which has a direct line to 1.13 billion people daily.
- Instagram, just by itself, has a direct line to 300 million people a day.
- Instagram has been able to get people to watch more and more videos in the app, even though it remains a not-great place to watch videos
- Instagram is getting 100 million views daily, all within a two month period.