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Instagram Stories puts more pressure on Snapchat as it hits 200 million users mark

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By Rebecca Stewart, Trends Editor

April 14, 2017 | 3 min read

Instagram is continuing its month of milestones, revealing that 200 million people are now using its Snapchat clone Stories every day.

INSTAGRAM STORIES SNAPCHAT 1

Instagram Stories puts more pressure on Snapchat as it hits 200 million users mark

The announcement means that the feature has attracted 50 million more daily active users since January, when Stories rolled out new ad formats to brands.

Snapchat, meanwhile, revealed during its IPO that that it ended 2016 with 158 million daily active users; meaning Instagram's milestone is likely to put pressure on the service to hold on to its young userbase and attract more subscribers.

When Instagram first unveiled Stories users were quick to call out the similarities and the Facebook-owned firm's chief executive Kevin Systrom even asserted that Snapchat deserved "all the credit" for the format.

Despite parallels being drawn, Instagram has continued to roll out a slew of features designed to take aim at Snapchat's user pool in the past few months, including updates to its Direct messaging service to make it more ephemeral.

Instagram's latest announcement brought with it some more updates, including location-specific Geostickers for users in cities like Chicago, London, Madrid and Tokyo. The app has also introduced Selfie Stickers, meaning within Stories users will be able to take a mini-selfie, which becomes a sticker they can edit and save for later use.

Finally, the app has launched a tool called Pinning, which lets users attach an interactive sticker or text to a specific object or location in a video. The feature is similar to Snapchat's own augmented reality Stickers feature it launched last April.

While Snapchat has proven popular with advertisers including Pepsi, 21st Century Fox and more, over 1m brands, including Nike and Airbnb, have run campaigns on Instagram, with the number of advertisers using the service's various ad formats growing five-fold in the past 12 months.

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