You could hate it, but Facebook Stories now has 500 million users – TechCrunch

You might think it's redundant with Instagram Stories, or just do not want to see the boring life of high school friends, but ephemeral Snapchat style stories now count 500 million daily users through Facebook and Messenger. The WhatsApp Status Stories feature contains 500 million dailies and Instagram reached that goal three months ago. This is impressive because it means that one third of Facebook's 1.56 billion daily users publish or watch stories every day, up from zero since the launch of the feature by Facebook two years ago .

For reference, Stories Inventor Snapchat has only 190 million daily users.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the new statistics regarding the call of the first quarter results of 2019 on Facebook, showing that the growth rate of its users had increased but that he had to save 3 Billion dollars for a possible fine from the FTC related to privacy practices.

Facebook does not just use Stories to keep people engaged, but to get more money out of it. Today, the director of operations, Sheryl Sandberg, announced that 3 million advertisers had already purchased Stories ads in the Facebook app family. I was expecting Facebook to launch a Stories advertising network soon so that other apps can display Facebook's vertical video ads and get a reduction in revenue.

Facebook's aggressive decision to clone Snapchat Stories, not only on Instagram, but everywhere, may have pissed off early users, but many of them have already passed. If you give people a place to put their face on top of their friends' phone, they will fill it. And if someone opens a window on the lives of people you know and people you would like to know, you will open this window regularly.