Facebook stories have now reached 500 million daily active users, up from the 300 million daily actives reported in September.
This number was revealed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an earnings call from yesterday.
Zuckerberg says that stories, along with messages and small groups, are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication.
In addition to this milestone, COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the stories format is growing amongst advertisers as well.
From the earnings call:
“Facebook and Instagram feed ads make up the bulk of our business today. We expect that to continue, but Stories are an increasingly important growth opportunity…
We’re proud to announce that we now have 3 million advertisers using Stories Ads to reach customers across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.”
Impressions from stories ads were the largest contributing factor to overall impression growth in Q1 2019.
Advertisers are moving towards stories ads so quickly that it’s causing a decline in the average price per ad since they’re sold at a lower price than feed ads.
Part of the rapid adoption of stories ads amongst advertisers, Sandberg explains, is because the company is actively encouraging marketers to use them.
Based on the notion that marketers tend to lag behind consumers, Facebook took the initiative to coach its advertisers on the use of stories ads.
Facebook’s effort to push the stories format seems to be paying off with users and advertisers.
With all of the privacy concerns surrounding Facebook lately, it’s interesting to see more people using a temporary form of content.
