Instagram Stories Get Almost 10% of All Ad Spending on Facebook

(Bloomberg) -- Instagram’s Stories are now making significant contributions to Facebook Inc., drawing almost 10% of all ad spending on the company’s properties at the end of the third quarter, according to a report by Socialbakers.

Launched in 2016, Instagram Stories are ephemeral posts of annotated photos and videos. Users tap through each piece of content and ads sometimes pop up between each story. Marketers’ embrace of the feature is important for Facebook because it shows the company’s business is keeping up with shifts in user behavior.

More people are starting to post via Stories, which disappear after 24 hours, as opposed to the Facebook news feed or Instagram feed where content stays visible. Facebook executives warned investors in their third-quarter earnings call that it may take a while for advertisers to fully catch on to the trend, and that Facebook ad prices will be lower on average in the meantime.

Advertiser spending on Instagram Stories jumped almost 70% from the prior year, according to Socialbakers, a social-media marketing company. Facebook doesn’t disclose how much ad revenue comes from Stories, but says the number of people using the feature continues to climb.

Instagram Stories has more than 500 million daily users. The product is getting more attention from advertisers than Facebook Stories, a similar feature that runs on the company’s main social network. Facebook Stories accounted for just 0.3% of total ad spending on Facebook platforms in the third quarter, according to Socialbakers. The firm’s data came from 9,500 Facebook advertising accounts.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Frier in San Francisco at sfrier1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Alistair Barr

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