Eight months after Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories, Instagram’s clone is officially bigger than Snapchat.
Every day, more than 200 million people use Instagram Stories, the Facebook-owned photo-and-video app announced on Thursday. By comparison, Snapchat averaged 158 million daily users in the fourth quarter of 2016, though that figure may have grown since the app’s parent company Snap Inc. disclosed it in February 2017.
The 200-million mark continues Instagram’s trend of adding around 50 million daily Stories users every three months. In January 2017, the feature counted more than 150 million daily users, up from 100 million in October 2016. The 200-million figure also means that half of Instagram’s 400 million daily users check out the Stories feature that appears atop the app’s main screen, as well as its Explore tab; that’s the same ratio that Instagram reached in January.
In addition to overtaking Snapchat’s user count, Instagram is also taking some more of Snapchat’s features to both Stories and Instagram Direct, its private messaging feature that was updated to be more Snapchatty earlier this week.
Now people can pin text, emoji and stickers to specific spots or objects in their videos, like a ? on the head of an actual cat, and the text/emoji/sticker will stick to whatever object it’s pinned to. That’s already possible on Snapchat.
Now, people can create their own stickers by tapping a smiley face icon to take a photo of an object that they can stick into a photo or video. Instagram dubs these selfie stickers because the idea is that people will take photos of themselves and convert those into stickers, but it’s possible to take a photo of anything and turn it into a sticker. That’s already possible on Snapchat, though on Snapchat you can trace out the sticker whereas on Instagram the selfie sticker must be circular.
And now, more people can use the geostickers that are customized to the city where a person is. After rolling out geostickers in New York and Jakarta, Indonesia, last month, Instagram is adding ones for people in Chicago, London, Madrid and Tokyo to add to their photos and videos. That’s already possible on Snapchat, but not for people in Chicago, Jakarta, Madrid or Tokyo.
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