Instagram Stories are as good, if not better, than Snapchat's, but that may present a short-term problem for Facebook as users spend less time on News Feeds
Ben Thompson / Stratechery : Tweets: @carnage4life See also Mediagazer Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Excellent post by @stratechery on Facebook vs Snapchat with many excellent points 1. Snapchat has been making excuses for user growth for 2 years2. Stories is worse ad format for than news feed3. Facebook cannibalized its news feed with stories http://stratechery.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after Stratechery framed Instagram Stories as copying done right — cloning Snapchat's iterated format onto Instagram's much larger user base — Ben Thompson's verdict is that the clone has caught up with the original. The related coverage traces the arc: Facebook seeded Stories across Messenger and Instagram through 2016 specifically to curb Snapchat's growth, and by mid-2018 it had roughly five times Snapchat's Stories users across its apps.
The twist in this analysis is that winning may hurt: Stories usage pulls time away from the News Feed, which remains Facebook's stronger ad format. That echoes an earlier pattern where Facebook Subscribe was good enough to slow Twitter — good-enough clones don't just blunt rivals, they reshape the cloner's own economics.
First-order effects
- Snapchat loses its last product-differentiation argument after what Dare Obasanjo characterizes as two years of growth excuses — its core format is now matched on a competitor with far larger distribution.
- Facebook faces an internal trade-off immediately: every minute users shift to Stories is a minute away from News Feed inventory that monetizes better.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's revenue growth now hinges on making the unskippable Stories ad format work at scale — the pressure flagged when its Stories audience hit 5x Snapchat's — pushing advertisers toward vertical video pricing rather than feed placements.
- Snapchat is forced to compete on everything except the Stories feature itself — its camera, discover content, and demographics — since feature parity removes the reason to choose it on format alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social platform competition settles into a cycle where any successful format is cloned within months by larger networks, shifting durable advantage from product innovation to distribution scale and ad-marketplace efficiency.
- Feed-based advertising gives way structurally to full-screen ephemeral formats as the default unit of social ad spend, forcing every platform's monetization model to be rebuilt around attention it once gave away for free.
The trend: Social media competition is converging on cloned full-screen Story formats, where scale and ad-format economics — not feature originality — decide winners.