8 Video and Social Marketing Stats That Got Our Attention This Week

It's been an unusually strong week for video and social media data points, especially if you are Facebook Inc. Check out the eight stats that grabbed our attention in recent days: 1. Imitation works Instagram has been relentlessly copying Snapchat's video features in recent months, and that strategy appears to have worked. Instagram said it now has 200 million people using its Snapchat-like Stories feature on a daily basis. So that feature alone on the Facebook-owned platform is more popular than Snapchat’s app, which has 158 million daily users. 2. Getting the message Facebook Messenger is increasingly popular, and its vp of messaging products, David Marcus, said the application now has more than 1.2 billion monthly users. The app had 500 million users at the end of 2014, so its growth has been impressive. 3. Everyone's doing Facebook ads Facebook announced Monday that it has more than 5 million advertisers worldwide, with nearly 50 percent of them creating their campaigns on mobile devices. 4. Billion-dollar aims Nextdoor, an online community platform that essentially combines the classic message board with Craigslist, hopes to emulate a degree of Facebook's success. The startup spent its first five and a half years building a sizable audience of social-media patrons more interested in what’s going on down the street than what their friends are up to in other time zones. With the possibility of getting to 100 million users by the end of the decade, it’s now rolling out advertising for the first time, and its own revenue forecast is noteworthy. “We think it will be $1 billion by 2020,” said Nirav Tolia, CEO of Nextdoor. “Look at the Yellow Pages; it’s still a $40 billion business in the U.S. … Over the last nine to 12 months, we’ve been getting more than 1,000 incoming advertising requests per week.” 5. Cord cutters test the 'Tube YouTube TV has been widely available for eight days now, and 147,300 smartphone and tablet users have downloaded the $35-a-month service so far, according to mobile-data company Apptopia. For the sake of comparison, consider that Dish Network’s Sling TV, another option for cord cutters at $20 a month, reportedly has anywhere between 1 million and 2 million subscribers. 6. More OTT Speaking of over-the-top TV, Netflix and Amazon currently dominate the game. According to a Forbes report, Netflix will have 128 million U.S. users this year, per eMarketer, encompassing 66 percent of OTT video consumers. The New York-based research firm, meanwhile, reportedly stated that Amazon will have 85.3 million viewers this year, representing 44 percent of the market. 7. Video explosion Video content shop Studio 71 has 1,200 channels on YouTube with more than 6.7 billion monthly views and is claiming a 95 percent year-over-year growth in views. Read more about Studio 71's NewFronts plans here, including a pitch about brand safety. 8. Direct growth Instagram revamped its Instagram Direct messaging feature, which now has 375 million monthly active users, up from 300 million last November. Bonus data: fintech's surprising capital Atlanta has become a Southern powerhouse in the financial technology world, attracting companies, talent and revenue that have put the city at the center of the burgeoning industry known as fintech. About 70 percent of the $4.4 trillion in payments processed in North America go through companies in Atlanta, according to the American Transaction Processors Coalition, or ATPC, a trade organization set up by the city of Atlanta in 2014 to advocate for fintech at the state and federal level. Check out our peach of a special package on the Empire City. Double bonus data: values are important In a new report, Forrester Research found that 52 percent of consumers believe a brand's values are important when it comes to deciding whether to make a purchase.