One of the more successfully borrowed features from Snapchat by Instagram is Stories. The feature has proven to be a huge hit amongst Instagram users, so much so that Facebook decided that it should be brought over to Facebook and WhatsApp as well. So much so that it doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that ads will now be displayed.
Ads on Instagram’s Stories have been around for a while now so we guess it was only a matter of time before they found their way onto Facebook as well. These days will run 5-15 seconds and they are skippable, pretty much like how they are on Instagram. However with Snapchat starting to test unskippable ads, don’t be surprised if such ad formats were to eventually make their way onto Facebook/Instagram Stories as well.
That being said, according to the numbers shared by TechCrunch, Facebook’s Stories daily users are said to be around 150 million, while Instagram is at 300 million. What’s interesting is that WhatsApp’s Stories (or Status) is even higher at 450 million, but we guess given that WhatsApp is a communications app, there might be more of a need for it than Instagram.
No word on whether or not we’ll be seeing ads arrive for WhatsApp’s Statuses in the future, but for now it remains ad-free.
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