IG has a much more active and diverse audience than plus ever did. In fact they are the king within their own world, where as plus was a me too product.
I just think they’re different worlds, with diff goals. Snap is more about your honest moment / communication thru pics where as IG is your idealized life.
Yes, IG is king of the general photo sharing social networks, which is different from what IG Stories and Snapchat do. That's why I brought up the comparison to Google Plus, Google did a lot of stuff that Facebook did, and Google Plus was an attempt at bringing a lot of these services together and create a Facebook competitor.
Like IG Stories, Google Plus had crazy fast growth at first, they hit almost 30 million users in the first month which was insane for that time and even today. They also had a very diverse audience. But, just like Instagram Stories, those numbers were only so high because most of their users were "users" because they were already partly on the platform through Gmail, like most IG Stories users were already IG users.
Look, I'm not saying IG Stories isn't a real competitor, but saying that Facebook didn't have competition during their IPO like Snapchat does is not true. Many people were predicting that Google Plus could kill Facebook. Read some articles from that time period, there was a lot of talk about that.
That's because many people have been looking for FB's demise for many years now. And generally people are pretty pro-Google. Especially the tech community. Including places like HN. So of course there would be articles and talk of Google+ being a threat. But it was always fluff.
There's articles to this day spelling the doom and gloom of Tesla. Just like there have been many for the past decade. It has always been one of the most shorted stocks. This isn't directly analogous, but just because a large amount of people believe this doesn't mean there aren't also a large amount of people who don't. Aka these people won't have hindsight bias either.
Many people also did not think Google+ was ever a threat, myself included. Google+ was always the butt of jokes with my friends with their inflated user numbers. So there isn't any hindsight bias from me or my friends or many discussions and articles I read during the time that didn't take G+ seriously.
IG stories isn't identical to Snap stories yet. IG is starting to think about allowing you to limit who you post content to. I assume this will be done with nice UX. Then the direct comparison of Snap and IG stories can be made. For now, IG stories main ground it has taken from Snap is unlikely to go back to Snap. People or companies with bigger audiences. IG makes more sense as a place to post your stories for these users.
It's likely that IG stories ratio of users who only consume stories is much greater than Snap. And the avg IG story has many more viewers. But Snapchat likely has many more stories posted.
I just think they’re different worlds, with diff goals. Snap is more about your honest moment / communication thru pics where as IG is your idealized life.