Instagram’s Stories feature may not be original, but it’s clearly working for the Facebook-owned photo sharing app: More than 200 million people use Stories every day, the Instagram team revealed in a blog post Thursday.
Stories also got a few minor feature updates this week, including location-specific stickers for users in Chicago, London, Madrid and Tokyo as well as something it calls “selfie stickers.”
Instagram first introduced Stories last August. Instagram’s head of product Kevin Weil openly admitted at the time that the feature was inspired by Snapchat’s own Stories, but also argued that it was simply part of a general trend towards more visual media sharing.
By highlighting the new usage data now, Instagram clearly puts pressure on Snapchat, which went public earlier this year and is set to report its first quarterly earnings next month. Snapchat revealed during its IPO that it ended 2016 with 158 million daily active users.
And Instagram’s Stories clone isn’t Facebook’s only attempt to undermine Snapchat. The company has since added Stories-like features to almost all of its popular apps, giving users of Whatsapp, Messenger and the main Facebook app tools to share photos and videos in a Snapchat-like fashion.
