Instagram Stories Is Now Even More Popular Than Snapchat

Though it may have just launched in the final months of 2015, Instagram‘s Snapchat clone, Stories, has quickly gained ground on the OG — so much so, in fact, that it’s now even more popular than the original app it copied. That’s right, folks: Instagram Stories now has more daily users than Snapchat.

As The Verge reports, Instagram Stories now boasts a whopping 200 million active daily users — those who either post an update or view that of a friend via the carousel that appears at the top on the screen on the app. By comparison, Snapchat had roughly 158 million active users as of the fourth quarter of 2016 — before it went public earlier this year. The news is undoubtedly troubling for shareholders and may point to at least one reason why Snap has placed such an emphasis on Spectacles, launching yet another pop-up in Venice, California just last month.

Since its debut, Instagram Stories has seemingly added one Snapchat feature after another to its own repertoire, most recently introducing disappearing DMs and four more cities to its Geostickers offerings. But, as The Verge points out, Stories’s copycat status is clearly not a deterrent to users “because users don’t care about originality in an app’s product roadmap so much as they’re concerned how their friends are communicating — and which apps they’re communicating on.”

Image Credit Instagram