Reports indicate that the threat of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) Instagram Stories to Snap Inc (NYSE:SNAP) Snapchat has grown if recent statistics are anything to go by. Currently the number of daily active users for Instagram Stories is 250 million. This was an increase of 50 million since April. This is in contrast to Snapchat Stories where the engagement level fell by 50% in June in comparison with a similar period last year. This is according to Delmondo, a social analytics firm.

“We saw a decline of 50% in average unique viewers per story from June 2016 to June 2017,” Nick Cicero the chief executive officer of Delmondo said while releasing the results where engagement level of 50,000 Snapchat Stories from publishers, brands as well as other influences were measured.

Snapchat on the defensive

The results indicate that the growth of Instagram Stories has been highly damaging to Snap Inc which recently went public. This is despite the fact that the chief executive officer of Snap Inc, Evan Spiegel, had laughed off the threat of Instagram Stories as soon as it was launched.

The report from Delmondo also comes at a time when Snap is still reeling from releasing an earnings report which missed the estimates of analysts causing the stock of the newly public firm to hit its lowest levels yet. Instagram Stories is also not slowing down as it has announced that it will be introducing live video. Starting Tuesday, users will have the option of sharing clips of live videos they have broadcast to Stories. In the past live videos only appeared in Stories and could not be viewed after the end of the live broadcast.

Live video

The new feature is expected to maintain the pace of growth for Instagram Stories since the addition of fresh content to the section will draw in more people to Stories. Instagram Stories has enjoyed phenomenal growth since it launched in August last year. In October last year it had notched 100 million users and by January this year the number had risen to 150 million.

On Tuesday shares of Snap Inc fell by 3.19% to close the day at $17.31.