Instagram Builds Its Own Version of Snapchat Live Stories
Instagram is taking cues from Snapchat and Twitter with its latest update — curated content streams for specific events, in this case, Halloween. — If you open the Instagram app in the U.S. on Saturday, you'll see a new prompt …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Halloween test was the seed of a copy-the-leader playbook Instagram spent the following two years executing. The Spotlight Compilations Instagram began curating for themes and events in early 2016 generalized what started here as a single-event stream, and by August 2016 the company went all the way with a full clone of Snapchat's ephemeral Stories format, rolled out globally on iOS and Android.
Read in sequence, the arc runs from curated event pages (this story) to personalized live-event video suggestions in Explore, to ephemeral live streaming and disappearing private messages that November. Each step took a format Snapchat pioneered and rebuilt it on Instagram's much larger installed base.
First-order effects
- U.S. Instagram users opening the app Saturday get a new prompt surfacing a curated Halloween content stream, making event aggregation a native feed rather than something users assemble via hashtags themselves.
- Snapchat's Live Stories format — its differentiator for event moments — now has the largest photo-sharing app shipping a direct imitation, converting a unique feature into table stakes.
Second-order effects
- Snapchat loses pricing leverage on its most-copied surface: once Instagram proves advertisers and users will accept event curation without Snapchat's brand, the format stops being a moat and starts being a cost of staying competitive.
- Curation becomes an editorial product line inside Instagram itself, pulling resources toward human- and algorithm-driven event programming — the mechanism behind both the Spotlight expansions and the Explore-tab live-event recommendations that followed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competition between consumer social apps shifts from inventing formats to out-distributing them: the follower of any viral feature can replicate it at scale, pressuring originators like Snapchat to keep innovating faster than incumbents can copy.
- Ephemeral, event-centric media moves from a niche differentiator toward a default expectation across platforms, setting up the multi-year feature-absorption cycle visible through the Stories clone and the 2017 face-filter additions.
The trend: Consumer social platforms are converging on Snapchat's ephemeral formats, with Instagram systematically rebuilding each one atop its larger network.