The Story of ‘Stories’ Highlights the Differences Between Facebook and Snapchat

Dan Calladine, Global Head of Media Futures

Facebook’s results last week were another triumph. Users, revenues and engagement were all up, continuing a very virtuous pattern that helped the stock reach record levels. Within all the numbers two stats really stood out: Both Instagram and Whatsapp have over 300m active daily users for their ‘Stories’ — features that have only been available for a bit over a year. While Facebook and its services — Insta, WhatsApp and others — have enormous levels of use, the biggest gains are now coming from features within the platforms, rather than the platforms themselves.

Facebook is now talking about using a new metric called ‘time well spent’ rather than the traditional media metric of ‘time spent’; essentially this is a measure of time spent interacting with friends, rather than consuming media. This suggests to me that Facebook will start encouraging meaningful interaction between friends, for example though messaging, or maybe through new messaging products like a group video chat app that has been rumoured for a while.

What is also interesting about the numbers for Stories users is that they are now nearly double the numbers declared by Snapchat — 170m daily — and Snapchat is of course the service that invented the whole format of ‘stories’ — a series of pictures and videos to describe your day. So while Snapchat was the originator, it took Facebook to perfect the idea and take it to a larger audience.

This ties in with another story I read this week: Will Oremus’ article in Slate comparing Snap to Facebook. While it is only conjecture, Oremus argues that Facebook, Google, Amazon and other Silicon Valley companies obsessively test and refine everything that they do, where Snapchat bases its decisions more on instinct, anecdote and gut feel. This could well explain why Snapchat has come up with almost all of the great media ideas recently — Stories, but also Lenses, and Discover — but that others have made more of a success of them.

This theory also shows the importance of a balanced and diverse media ecosystem. Innovation needs imagination and risk taking — ‘Think Different’ — as well as data & optimisation. It is fine for the big tech companies to endlessly refine to perfection, but they need vibrant competition and a regular injection of new ideas too.

Please note these views are Dan Calladine’s and not necessarily those of the company.