The rise of Stories
What tomorrow’s apps need to know
It is rare to see new storytelling formats. It is even more rare to see one become as wildly popular as the vertical, temporary, and visual format of Stories. Today, more than a billion people around the world see a Story every day in popular apps like TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more. This format is a mainstay of most social and messaging apps and is slowly making its way to other types of apps. We examine the history of this format, the factors that drove its popularity, and how businesses should rethink their app experiences in light of the rise of Stories.
Origins of Story and why it works
Millennial-focused messaging app Snapchat launched Snapchat Stories in October 2013 and invented the format that we know today. Stories had a number of innovations - they were vertical-only and took up the full phone screen, they automatically disappeared after 24 hours, they were short-form and primarily video, they could be viewed as a series and skipped with a single tap, and the only other interaction they allowed was swiping up to take action. Each of these created distinct user behaviors that led to exponential growth of Snapchat. A month after Stories launched, Facebook tried to buy Snapchat for $3B. 9 months after that, 40% of 18-year olds in the US were using Stories daily.
By taking up the whole screen, Stories grabbed the user’s complete attention. This also made Stories the true mobile-native format that did not require users to rotate their phones or squint to see the content. Their temporary nature encouraged users to share a lot more freely without worrying about making the content look like a work of art. Their short duration and engaging video format meant users were far more likely to view complete Stories. Stringing together multiple Stories made storytelling both easier and more compelling.
Mainstream acceptance
Stories immediately took off in Snapchat’s user base. However, it would be another 3 years before the format started showing up in other apps, starting with Instagram in August 2016. Instagram’s founders openly praised Snapchat in innovating this format but it was Instagram that truly made Stories mainstream. Within a year of launching, 200 million users were using Instagram Stories and this doubled to 400 million a year later. If Stories were a standalone app, it would have been the fastest growing social app in history! It was not long before other apps started adding Stories beginning with the rest of Instagram’s family members - WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is betting the future of Facebook on videos and Stories, going so far as to say that the opportunity will be far bigger than the very lucrative news feed.
Medium, Skype, and Youtube added their own spin to the Stories format while keeping all the good stuff intact. The newest beneficiaries of this format were TikTok and its Chinese version Douyin. TikTok has embraced this format whole-heartedly and add a lot more sugar on top to make it engaging. TikTok has grown like wildfire across the world thanks to swipeable short-form videos in its app.
Stories in other apps
Today, we are seeing the rise of Stories in apps where you would not traditionally expect it. Last May, Airbnb launched a feature allowing their users to create Stories from their travels and experiences. A few weeks ago, Spotify announced it is testing a similar feature for artists to share visual content with their followers. On the same day, Uber added vertical videos of driver journeys to their app. Indian apps are leading the charge too. Zomato has videos for many restaurants while Swiggy has rich dynamic videos for dishes of marquee restaurants. The same goes for Chinese apps too. Alibaba has launched Lu Ke that uses videos to drive purchases on its e-commerce offering Taobao.
These massive apps have slowly but surely realised that users want short-form videos not just for entertainment but as the primary way to interact with apps. It will no longer be enough to present information plainly with static images and text. “Apps of the future will have to become more visual and interactive if they want to attract user attention”, says Satej Sirur, CEO of video platform Rocketium. Having raised $1M to help businesses add video capabilities to their products, he knows a thing or two about the power of video. “We are seeing increasing interest in vertical videos from businesses of all sizes. Tech-savvy businesses are using our video automation to create Stories from existing content on their platform.”, Satej adds.
Despite the growing popularity of Stories, businesses cannot add this to their products easily. Video is a fundamentally hard technology to get right. Enabling users to create impressive videos needs sophisticated tools that are not easy to build in-house. Building scalable rendering technology is time-consuming and expensive. That is where a new breed of technology startups like Rocketium think they can add value. “Our video creation and rendering capabilities are battle-tested by thousands of users from around the world. With a few lines of code, businesses can add our video creator to their apps and websites to allow their users to create slick videos. Businesses can focus on their core and leave the video technology to us.”
India loves Stories
Stories are a rare breed in India, working as effectively for hip urban youngsters as for the middle-aged rural folk. But different aspects of Stories make them click for India Two and India Three. Videos work better than the written word because many parts of the country are not yet at 100% literacy rates. The massive popularity of movies means shorter videos are a lot more appealing than text. Most of India has leapfrogged tech adoption and started with smartphones, where watching a video is far easier than reading. Also, most Indian consumers prefer the curated recommendations of a friendly corner shop rather than the do-it-yourself ethic of a supermarket. This drives the adoption of video apps with algorithmic recommendations over the spartan approach of search engines and online magazines.
Looking ahead
Like it or not, video will play a larger role in the coming years. Growing usage of smartphones, increasing mobile network speeds, and the coming of 5G will only accelerate this trend. Stories and other short-form video formats will start showing up in more and more places. E-commerce is a natural place where video will help customers discover products better. Allowing users to share video reviews or influencers to shape conversations will lead to much better engagement. Travel, fashion, health, and other lifestyle apps will be able to engage users far better with rich interactive videos. News is another area where multilingual videos and crowdsourced journalism can change the game. We are moving away from a world of static content to a rich, visual world that combines different types of media and businesses will have to adapt how they communicate with their users.
Adding Stories to existing products
Companies who want to add a Stories feature to their products have to start by making a few choices - will this be app-only or app and website, which devices and browsers will be supported, should we support video or only images, which languages should we support, and what unique creation features will we have. These choices will determine the user experience and have a bearing on the technical implementation. Regardless of these choices, the engineering teams will have to figure out how to store and process large amounts of images and videos. They will need to come up with a way to create impressive-looking videos from user images, clips, text, and audio. They will need to optimise the technical architecture so that every video impressive and gets rendered as quickly as possible. Designers will have to keep coming up with engaging video formats so users have something unique to create each time. The engineering team will have to make it easy for designers to create and make new formats available to users.
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Uber offers shareable video of drivers' journeys [2019-05-13]
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