Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Status cross 300 million users mark each!

The clones have taken over, and the future looks brighter for Snapchat’s rivals, Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status, both of which have reportedly breached the 300 million users mark each!

That number is pretty much twice of what Snapchat has accomplished in its entire existence, something Instagram Stories has done in little over a year, and WhatsApp Status has done it in lesser time. In contrast with 300 million users for Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status, Snapchat only has 173 million users.

Facebook has Stories clones on all their platforms, and has repeatedly copied even more Snapchat exclusive features like face filters, and although Facebook Stories and Messenger Day may not be as popular, Stories on Instagram and WhatsApp have showed no signs of slowing down.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the news today along with many other revelations of Facebook’s Q3 earnings, denouncing the Russians use of Facebook’s tools to manipulate the elections in the United States, and claiming that the biggest trend over the next three years, will be video.

In June this year, Instagram Stories crossed 250 million users and has now reportedly gathered 50 million more in less than six months time, and Facebook intends to make Stories more fun.

Mark Zuckerberg also states that he is looking at turning the time spent on Facebook and it’s family of platforms to ‘time well spent.’

Constructing Status around close friends and family has certainly helped the service take off among WhatsApp users.

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine writes, “Because Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status are peer-to-peer video usually viewed by close friends, they enhance the community feel of Facebook’s apps in ways that top-down professionally produced content can’t. People also watch these short clips intensely, which could be a boon for the advertisements Facebook now inserts between Instagram Stories.”

Instagram is pivoting their platform around Stories and are pushing for more attention to be diverted to it after they recently began to show Stories mid feed in order to entice more of Instagram’s regular users to use the feature.

Things certainly seem to working for them now that more than 300 million users are spending their time daily on Instagram Stories, which is more than half of Instagram’s 500 million daily users. A significant chunk of their gross total of 800 million users, whereas WhatsApp Status too has been doing pretty well.

With a string of new features on Instagram Stories including the new Poll feature being received very well by users, it’s making things harder for Snapchat is the most glaring observation one can make, that is for sure.