Stories are a form of social sharing originally invented by Snapchat, where vertical videos and images, sometimes overlaid with stickers and animations, are shared on a user’s profile but then disappear within a timeframe. Combined, nearly a billion people share stories across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat. Facebook shamelessly ripped off the format in 2016 with the launch of Instagram Stories, followed by launching Facebook Stories, Facebook Messenger Stories, and WhatsApp Stories… They now own three of the top four most popular platforms for sharing stories, with over 500 million people creating stories each day on Instagram, compared to Snapchat’s 220 million. Stories as a format is growing 15x faster than feed-based sharing, and is expected to be the primary way people share things on Facebook within the year.
Read the full piece at What’s New in Publishing
