It’s hard not to give almost all the credit for this rapid growth to Stories. Instagram, at six years old, had 500 million monthly users and 300 million daily users shortly before the launch of Stories a year ago last month. In just over the last year, those numbers have shot up by around 160 percent, with Instagram announcing new milestones every couple of months.
The milestone also speaks to how Instagram seems to be limiting the growth of Snapchat. Snapchat was at 173 million daily users last month, up only 30 million from the year before. Instagram had a huge head start because of its larger initial user base, which certainly helped its Stories feature take off in such a big way. But Snapchat had the feature well before Instagram did, and it seems that people are choosing the convenience of staying inside of Instagram over the unique features that Snap tends to get to first.What makes this milestone really stand out is Instagram’s daily user count. Daily usage is much harder to get, but a feature like Stories rewards people who come back every single day; if you don’t open the app in time, your friends’ stories will just disappear. Facebook has been steadily building businesses that reach over 1 billion people each day, like WhatsApp, which passed that milestone in June. Instagram is still a ways away from a full billion, but it reached the halfway mark much faster due to the launch of Stories.
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