Instagram is still clobbering Snapchat and it's worse than we thought

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Instagram is still clobbering Snapchat, and it's worse than we thought

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Instagram is still clobbering Snapchat, and it's worse than we thought

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By Karissa Bell2017-06-20 16:00:00 UTC

Instagram Stories is still eating Snapchat alive, and we have fresh data to prove it. 

Instagram's Stories now have 250 million daily active users, up from 200 million in April, according to the company. At the same time, engagement with Snapchat Stories declined 50 percent in June compared with the same time last year, according to new numbers from social analytics company Delmondo.

"We saw a decline of 50 percent in average unique viewers per story from June 2016 to June 2017," says Delmondo CEO Nick Cicero, who looked at engagement across 50,000 Snapchat Stories from brands, publishers, and other influencers. 

The new metrics highlight just how damaging the meteoric rise of Instagram Stories has been for the newly public Snap Inc. The company declined to comment on Delmondo's findings. 

Delmondo's report comes on the heels of a rough couple of weeks for the company. Snap's first ever earnings report was a hard miss, third-party data from Sensor Tower says downloads are on the decline, and last week the company's stock hit an all-time low since going public earlier this year.

Still, not everything may be quite as dire as it sounds.

Yikes.

Still, not everything may be quite as dire as it sounds. Just yesterday, the company inked a new deal with Time Warner to the tune of $100 million, and Snap has recently — surprise, surprise — touted a few vanity stats of its own. 

Namely that 60 percent of interactions on the app are among "close friends" — an area where Snap has attempted to draw a stark difference between itself and its much larger competitors. And on CEO Evan Spiegel's first ever earnings call with investors, he played up his company's focus on enabling the creativity of its highly engaged, if not as large, user base. Additionally, research from App Annie found that 35 percent of Snapchat's daily users in the U.S don't use Facebook "on any given" day.

In any case, what is clear is that Instagram shows no signs of slowing down. The company has steadily added new capabilities to its Stories after first putting the feature front and center last summer. Now, the company is doubling down on live video, too

Beginning Tuesday, users who broadcast live videos on the platform can opt to share the clips to the Stories section of the app for 24 hours at a time. Previously, live videos appeared in the Stories area, but weren't viewable after a broadcast had ended. 

The update is notable for a couple of reasons: For one, it stands to help Instagram maintain the growth of Stories. Though live videos aren't the same as Stories, adding fresh content to that section of the app will encourage more people to watch Stories (since videos auto-advance, a feature Snap axed last fall). It also suggests the company is ready to start pushing harder into live video.

Live video is also, notably, an area Snap has avoided. Still, anything that adds up to more eyeballs on Instagram Stories could ultimately spell more bad news for the company. 

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June 20, 2017 at 11:01AM