Facebook, with 5x Stories users across its apps than Snapchat, needs to make the unskippable Stories ad format work to keep revenues growing
Josh Constine / TechCrunch : Tweets: @joshconstine , @triketora , and @mikeisaac Tweets: Josh Constine / @joshconstine : Stories ads are a whole new ballgame http://twitter.com/... Tracy Chou / @triketora : The shift from News Feed ads to Stories ads will be a bigger transition than desktop ads to mobile ads for Facebook. http://techcrunch.com/... @mikeisaac : that means an entirely new set of ads and training a generation of marketers to make different creative for a completely different formatit is an enormous, company wide bet, which is why they don't care about “ripping off snapchat"more from josh:http://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here starts in August 2016, when Instagram cloned Snapchat's Stories format outright — analysis at the time called it copying done right because Instagram imported years of Snap's iteration onto its own much larger user base, and predicted it would slow Snapchat's growth just as Facebook Subscribe once slowed Twitter.
Two years later that prediction has landed: Facebook now counts five times as many Stories users across its apps as Snapchat itself. But scale isn't monetization — as TechCrunch's Josh Constine reports, Facebook needs the unskippable Stories ad unit to perform, and Tracy Chou frames the feed-to-Stories transition as potentially bigger than desktop-to-mobile was.
First-order effects
- Advertisers trained on News Feed units must now produce vertical, full-screen, sound-on creative for an unskippable slot — Mike Isaac's point that this means training a generation of marketers lands directly on agencies and brand teams buying Facebook inventory today.
- Facebook's revenue growth model, built on News Feed ads, is under pressure from its own success: as Stratechery noted, better Stories means users spend less time in the Feed, so the new format has to earn more per impression than the one it cannibalizes.
Second-order effects
- Snapchat loses the differentiation that built its ad business — it grew by persuading brands to try untested experimental formats (per the NYT's account of its early ad push) — because Facebook can now offer the same pioneering format at 5x the audience, compressing Snap's premium for novelty.
- If unskippable Stories ads price well, expect Facebook to accelerate the shift across Messenger and WhatsApp Stories too, forcing every campaign buy to be re-planned around full-screen video rather than feed placements.
Third-order effects
- The structural endpoint is Stories replacing the News Feed as social media's default ad surface — a format change so large, in Chou's framing, that it rivals the desktop-to-mobile transition that reshaped the industry a decade ago.
- Because Facebook proved a cloned feature can out-scale its inventor, the durable lesson for the industry is that distribution beats originator advantage in consumer social — which shapes how platforms treat each other's feature launches going forward.
The trend: Social advertising is migrating from the News Feed to full-screen vertical Stories, with Facebook's copied-and-scaled version turning Snapchat's invented format into the industry's default ad unit.