Facebook Stories Hits 500 Million Daily Users as Q1 Revenues Soar

After announcing Q1 revenue of $15.08 billion USD and advertising revenue of $14.91 billion USD–both up 26% year-on-year–Facebook also announced other important stats during its earnings call.

Facebook Stories is now used by 500 million daily users, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the call. The feature, which is essentially a borrowed idea from Snapchat, allows users to post images or videos for their friends to view, in both Facebook and Messenger. The feature is also available in the company’s Instagram and WhatsApp apps.

The 500 million daily users number also applies each to Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status. Out of 1.56 billion daily Facebook users, one-third of them are looking at Stories every day.

To put this into perspective, Snapchat only has 190 million daily users.

According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, 3 million advertisers have purchased Stories ads across the company’s apps. Expect more ads to come to leverage the high number of eyeballs Stories are getting, as people just can’t get enough of creeping on their friends who willingly share every moment of their lives (even if it’s fake news).

NYT: Facebook Expects to Be Fined Up to $5 Billion by F.T.C. Over Privacy Issues (for context: FB had profits of $22 billion last year). https://t.co/6C7RPtCnCF

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) April 24, 2019

Facebook is making boatloads of money—so much that it has set aside $3 billion USD aside to pay for a potential upcoming FTC settlement, related to the social network’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. The company expects the settlement to be upwards of $5 billion USD, a drop in the bucket to Facebook’s current $45 billion USD in cash on hand.

In after-hours trading, Facebook’s stock as of writing is up to $196.38 US per share, a gain of 7.56%.

[via TechCrunch]