Facebook has announced that its Stories feature now has 150 million daily active users.
The announcement comes a little over a year after Facebook launched its clone of Snapchat Stories.
As part of the announcement, Facebook said it would begin testing ads in Stories starting today. Users in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil will start seeing five to 15 second ads they can skip. Facebook also plans to add clickable ads in the coming months.
Advertisers can easily transfer ads from Instagram Stories to Facebook Stories. The social media platform also has automatic tools that can reformat News Feed ads to work in Stories.
Considering Facebook CPO Chris Cox said Stories will overtake feed posts as the number one way to share sometime next year, Facebook has to get Stories ads right.
The other part of this is that Snapchat has essentially been beaten. Snapchat’s daily user growth was it’s lowest ever last quarter and in March its user count shrank. Without a strong competitor in the Stories market, Facebook can advertise more freely.
By making it easy to migrate ads between Facebook and Instagram Stories, Facebook also locks advertisers into its ecosystem. Unless a company wants to advertise specifically to young teens, it may not be worth the trouble for them to advertise on Snapchat.
Source: TechCrunch
