Instagram Stories daily audience hits 250M, adds live Story replays

Every day, more than 250 million people view Instagram Stories, the Facebook-owned photo-and-video sharing app announced on Tuesday. That’s a 25 percent increase since April, when Instagram’s 10-month-old clone of Snapchat’s Stories feature hit the 200-million-user mark. It also means that Stories’ daily audience growth has picked up its pace as Snapchat’s own daily audience growth struggles to surpass single-digit percentages.

Since Instagram announced in October that 100 million people viewed Stories daily, it has added 50 million new daily viewers every three months. Now the trend has ramped up. In two months, Stories has gained 50 million new viewers, likely thanks to the network effect that comes with having an overall daily audience of more than 400 million people and slotting the Stories feed atop the app’s main screen.

By comparison, Snapchat’s daily audience growth slowed to the single digits since Instagram copied one of its main features in August 2016. In April, Instagram’s Stories daily audience surpassed Snapchat’s overall daily audience — which topped 166 million people in the first quarter of 2017 — and the Facebook-owned app continues to surpass its rival (and muse).

To accelerate its Stories viewership even more, Instagram is giving people more to view within Stories. Last November, Instagram added an option for people to live-stream themselves; these broadcasts would appear within viewers’ Stories feed, but only while the broadcast was airing. Once the stream ended, so did the chance to watch it. Not anymore.

Now, after a broadcast has ended, people can choose to share a replay of their live stream for up to 24 hours. In addition to the video replaying, the likes and comments that people posted during the live stream will also replay, according to a company blog post announcing the replay option. People watching a replay will be able to fast-forward or rewind for 15 seconds at a time by tapping the right and left sides of the screen, respectively. These on-demand viewers can also send a message to the broadcaster using the “Send Message” button, which also appears in non-live Stories.