When asked whether he was scared of Facebook after the company launched Instagram Stories, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel laughed it off, saying “just because Yahoo has a search box, it doesn’t mean they’re Google.”
But on Tuesday, shares of Snap fell 3.4% on the news that Instagram Stories (Facebook owns Instagram) now boasts 250 million active users each day, according to a Facebook blog post. That’s about 50% higher than the daily active user base Snap reported in May: 166 million.
Instagram Stories, which also features disappearing photos, first surpassed Snapchat in April, when the company revealed some 200 million daily active users. Facebook first added the feature to Instagram in August.
“If you think about it a year ago when we sat together, Instagram Stories didn’t exist,” Facebook’s global head of sales Carolyn Everson told CNBC. “Today on the platform, we not only have 250 million people using it, but actually a third (of the most viewed stories) are businesses using Instagram Stories and one million are advertisers.”
Shares of Snap are now trading at $17.32, just above its IPO price of $17. The company, which is heavily shorted, dipped to that price earlier this month amid a tech stock sell off.
