Instagram's Stories feature now has more daily users than Snapchat, a victory for Facebook in its battle to extinguish the threat from the messaging app. Instagram said that 200m people a day now use Stories, a feature that is closely modelled on Snapchat, up from 150m in January and more than the 158m daily users Snapchat reported in February. The figures will come as a blow to the ephemeral messaging app, which has been struggling to fight off competition from Facebook since the bigger rival launched copycat Stories features on both the Instagram and Facebook platforms. Stories were first introduced on Snapchat as a way to share picture and video montages with all a users' connections at once. In the past year Facebook has introduced the daily update feature on its Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp platforms. It has also gradually added minor updates that make the section more similar to that of its rival, such as geolocation stickers and masks on Instagram Stories and Facebook Live. Critics have accused Facebook of shamelessly trying to clone Snapchat in order to destroy its popularity. But the social network has defended the similarity of its features to Snapchat's by describing Stories as a "universal format" akin to status updates, rather than a unique feature. Luckily for Snapchat, Stories hasn't been as popular on Facebook's other platforms as it has on Instagram. The success of Instagram Stories is somewhat an anomaly in Facebook's attempts to clone and kill the rival. Past attempts, which have not been as successful include the Slingshot and Poke apps, as well as end-to-end encryption in Messenger. Nevertheless Snapchat's share price dropped 1.4 per cent to less than $20 (£16) following the news.
