Why "stories" took over social media

this video was sponsored by brilliant a problem solving website that teaches you how to think like an engineer a couple of weeks ago I went to this event where I met a lot of other youtubers and as soon as I arrived it hit me that all of these brilliant media savvy people whenever they shared anything to social media it was all in the form of stories YouTube stories Instagram stories and snapchat snaps stories I don't know what they're called anyway stories were clearly the overwhelmingly preferred content format of choice for people who really know how to use social media and on a rational level I knew that stories were a huge deal I mean I've read the news article saying how quickly they're growing in compared to other social media formats I've seen every conceivable platform try to adopt them from social media to messaging and then also really weird ones like Skype and LinkedIn and median for some reason but seeing them being so overwhelmingly dominant in real life with real users still took me by surprise so I decided to dedicate the 54th episode of the story behind series to figuring out what exactly makes stories so successful [Music] real quick before we start if you would like to see more in-depth analysis of tech companies especially from a business perspective consider subscribing to tackled are as confusing as this format was to me at first something clicked when I thought about it in historical context historically every medium eventually created a dominant format that seems obvious in retrospect paper peaked with newspapers as TIFF printing processes made the bundling together of a bunch of articles into a little booklet really effective the early internet with static websites as hyperlinking made individual webpages that users could hop between in a browser very effective the killer format of web 2.0 the interactive web was the newsfeed as the billions of user generated posts and photos neatly fell into place in an infinitely scrollable wall of content and so it is natural that smartphones as a medium would also sooner or later develop a truly native format as well which is what stories seem to be well the newsfeed has over time being to work well enough on smartphones with the introduction of mobile native interactions like double tapping - like or pinching to zoom on Instagram for example even in its most up-to-date form it still feels very much like a desktop internet product that was just squeezed into phones news feeds consist mostly of text links to articles and Static images that work more or less the same on desktops and on smartphones creating a post for a newsfeed and often requires a lot of typing which is not ideal with virtual keyboards and visual elements tend to be laid out horizontally so the user has to expand them or even rotate their phone to see them properly these in my opinion are all artifacts of a format that wasn't originally conceptualized for smartphones but rather adopted to them afterwards which makes sense because Facebook came up with the newsfeed about a year before the iPhone came to the market and about two years before Android was announced stories though while they might feel endlessly clumsy on a desktop we're tailor-made for smartphones they make full use of these small screens phones have without any wasted whitespace and they are locked to portrait mode no more having to rotate the phones around navigation is done by tapping and swiping which is natural on touchscreen smartphones and creating stories is easier on phones - as they usually just require a tap on a shutter button and maybe a selection of an AR sticker rather than lengthy text input on clumsy virtual keyboards stories are undoubtedly the premier smartphone format and seem to slowly move beyond just personal updates to Google for example has introduced amp stories accelerated mobile pages stories for news which are essentially a format that lets news organizations do journalism in a more visually engaging way on smartphones in a similar way medium the hugely popular blogging platform has recently introduced series which is just there to take on stories so bloggers can easily use that format to the adoption of stories has been slower for journalism than has been for social sharing but it's slowly starting to happen - talking about adoption stories now have over 500 million active users on each of the three big Facebook platforms usage has grown by over 8 percent in the last two years and Facebook executives in 2018 said that the story format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year so that will be now wish I guess of course the story is working well on smartphones isn't the only thing that made them popular I'd say there are two more key factors to their success one the fact that they don't stick around forever which people really seem to dig and two the fact that they're great as advertisement vehicles which advertisers seem to love an alligator when I first heard about a platform that was designed to send self-destructing photos videos I struggled to understand how it would become relevant beyond just you know sending nudes and stuff I'm clearly not a social media visionary and in fact I still actually prefer tweeting as my main social media as opposed to stories by the way if you want to follow me on any of the social medias twitter is probably the right one but what self-destructing stories have enabled beyond just the sending of nudes of course is for posts to become more spontaneous because regular social media you know the newsfeed kind of stuff has weirdly become this fairly high pressure environment for a lot of people anything that goes on your wall typically stays there including quantified metrics for how popular or unpopular your posts are this permanence and kind of competitive environment made users heavily curate newsfeed posts aiming to only put the most popular stuff up stories on the other hand have much less of this pressure to be perfect they self destructs of the aren't permanent and likes are hidden so the pressure for perfection is lower unsurprisingly this means that stories have significantly higher upload frequencies and appear less curated and more authentic than newsfeed posts and finally money is starting to flock to stories as well because of course any format that will make content more engaging will likely also lead to advertising on the platform becoming more gauging indeed stories allow for fullscreen video ads often with audio to be injected right between organic posts without them feeling too out of place don't get me wrong they're still annoying but much less so than also playing full screen ads would feel in almost any other format on a phone it is not a surprise then that the advertisers are increasingly throwing more and more money at stories with over 25 percent of total advertisement spending on the Instagram for example already going through this format and seeing this massive growth in usage as well as ever more engaged audiences and advertisers I'd be surprised if stories didn't eventually become the primary revenue driver for Facebook now while stories might be great for the bottom line of companies I think for you the user they're just an even more engaging way to waste your time you've brain cells and to consume even more advertisements so if you find yourself with five minutes to spare and you have your phone with you why not try the brilliant app instead it lets you learn real science and engineering on the go with just five minutes a day you can do brilliance daily challenges and learn a new scientific concept every day like how astronomers find planets using starlight for example if you prefer more in-depth learning you can complete one of their fully interactive courses like this one on computer memory for example that give you the proper framework and context to fully understand the subject and use quizzes to drive your learnings home at the end go to brilliant org slash tech author and sign up for free or get 20% of an annual premium subscription with the same ad link [Music]

Channel: TechAltar

Views: 167,665

Rating: 4.9216394 out of 5

Keywords: Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook, Messenger, stories, social media, format, success, rise, take over, win, popular, spread, grow, AR, sticker, filter

Id: ZbmyPUMva4M

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 19 2019