Two months after introducing Snapchat-style stories to the app, Instagram today announced that stories are coming to the explore tab as well.
The company says 100 million people visit the tab each day to find photos and videos from accounts they don’t yet follow.
Now they’ll see stories there as well: a rolling series of posts that disappear 24 hours after they are posted, just like on Snapchat.
For Instagram, adding stories had two key objectives. The first was to get users to share more photos and videos at a time when their rate of sharing had begun to decline.
The second was to blunt the momentum of Snapchat, which has become the default place to share and socialize for a younger generation.
So far, it seems like Instagram stories are working well enough — the company says that one-third of its 300 million daily users interact with stories every day.
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