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Instagram stories now has 250 million daily active users (DAUs), which is up from 200 million users in April and well above Snap’s last reported 166 million users, TechCrunch reports.
The growth follows recently added features — Instagram added location stories in May and has worked on improving discoverability of other user stories. Here’s why the milestone is important:
- Instagram is gaining users at a faster clip. Instagram Stories went from 200 million daily users in April to its current 250 million, which is roughly 2 months. It took roughly 3 months for the company to go from 150 million daily users in January to 200 million in April of this year. This is in contrast to Snapchat, which only added 8 million daily users to reach 166 million in Q1 2017 from 158 million in Q4 2016.
- Instagram Stories could see increased engagement from brands. The latest user milestone could be leveraged to get more brands to post and use Instagram Stories, as brands now know the feature is getting more eyeballs. Instagram also already rolled out 15-second video ads between stories in January, which provides another potential avenue for revenue for brands.
Instagram is also adding a new feature that allows live videos to be uploaded to Instagram users’ Stories, which will then be available for 24 hours. The feature also offers a new way for users to interact with Instagram Stories. Users may be inclined to live stream more often now that the content will be available for ephemeral viewing afterwards.
The continued success of Instagram Stories poses a danger to Snap. Slowing user growth remains an issue for Snap. On the other hand, Instagram has been rapidly adding users on its platform, which doesn’t help Snap’s current effort in proving to advertisers it can compete with incumbents Google and Facebook, in terms of user monetization potential.
Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on app engagement that explores the current state of the app market, the issues around engaging consumers, and the tools at a publisher's disposal. It also identifies best practices for the implementation of some app engagement tools, and presents the pitfalls that:
- Identifies the major challenges in today's app market and explains why employing good app engagement practices is more important than ever before.
- Presents the major app engagement tools currently available.
- Examines the pros and cons of each app engagement tool while outlining some pitfalls that publishers encounter in implementing them.
- Prescribes best practices for adopting various app engagement tools or strategies.
- Assesses how the market will likely change over the next five years as emerging technologies change both consumer behavior with mobile devices and introduce new tools with which to engage consumers.
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