Facebook, parent company of Instagram, reported that Instagram stories feature has over 200 million users. This figure is much bigger than the total number of people that use Snapchat as a whole, 160 million. In case you are keeping score, the totality of Instagram has 600 million users as of August last year. The number of people in Snapchat that use the stories feature was not reported. Well to be fair, Instagram has been around a lot longer than Snapchat so it is expected to have more users.
The statistics of Instagram stories are important since Facebook stole the feature from Snapchat. You see, the social network giant tried to buy Snapchat in 2013 for a whopping $3 Billion, that’s three times the amount that Instagram was acquired with. Snapchat, however, rejected the offer.
Since then, Facebook has been busy stealing all the features that make Snapchat unique starting with the stories feature. In WhatsApp (another Facebook’s acquisition), the feature is called Status, it also dwells in Facebook’s messenger as well.
Facebook doesn’t seem to be done with the copying, they recently announced selfie stickers, sticker pinning for videos and custom geo stickers for the city of Chicago, London, Madrid and Tokyo.
Do you think Snapchat made a good move rejecting the offer from Facebook? Do you think it is right for Facebook to bully its way by copying all the features that differentiate Snapchat? Well at least for the first question, Snapchat is doing great on its own, it is now worth over $20Billion according to the IPO Valuation it got.