Social networking titan Facebook has recently revealed that its Facebook Stories feature has hit a daily active user mark of 150 million.
The feature was launched 14 months ago, and has since been relatively under the radar as Facebook users took a while to get used to seeing a feature taken from Snapchat on Facebook’s main platform. After a slow take-up rate, the feature is now seeing plenty of users embracing it.
At present, the Stories feature is available across five platforms – WhatsApp’s Status, Instagram Stories, Snapchat Stories, Facebook Stories and Messenger Days. The largest user uptake comes from WhatsApp’s Status, which has around 450 million daily users. This is followed by Instagram’s version of the feature, which has 300 million daily users. Messenger days has the lowest number of users, with 70 million.
Snapchat, the creator of the feature, is starting to lag behind in terms of both users of Stories and total number of users. The whole of Snapchat has 191 million daily users, which is considerably fewer than the number of users of Instagram Stories. With Facebook Stories reaching the 150 million milestone, it can only be a matter of time before it overtakes the app it has wanted to take down for years.
Facebook feels that now it has a solid user base, it is time to start generating some revenue from the feature. It is in the process of introducing ads to it, starting in Brazil, the US and Mexico. This is something users could have expected, as Instagram, another Facebook-owned platform that uses the Snapchat feature, already has ads in this section of the app. It also added these ads when it hit 150 million users, however, it reached this milestone almost three times quicker than Facebook Stories, hitting that threshold after just five months.
The videos last between 5 and 15 seconds, and users will be able to skip them in the same way they can skip their friends’ stories. At the moment, these ads will not feature any calls to action, but this is something that may be introduced in the future.
Facebook will be hoping that it gets Story ads right at the first attempt, as according to Chris Cox, the company’s CPO, the company expects that Stories will overtake news feed posts as the most popular way to share content on the site as early as next year.
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