Facebook may have disappointed investors with its second quarter results and grim outlook on Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean that all is bad in the company’s social media empire. In fact, one of the reasons for the company’s warning of slowing revenue growth in coming quarters is the success of the relatively new Stories format across Facebook’s platforms. First introduced on Instagram in August 2016, the Stories format was heavily “inspired” by one of Snapchat’s most popular features and gradually found its way to all of Facebook’s social media apps.

Both Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status (which might as well have been named Stories as well) have long surpassed Snapchat in terms of daily active users and Facebook Stories is probably next in line. The ongoing shift towards stories at the expense of feeds in social media poses a new challenge for Facebook, because it’s unclear whether the new format can be monetized as effectively as the news feed. “Will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? We honestly don’t know”, COO Sheryl Sandberg admitted in Wednesday’s conference call. However, the same was once said about the shift to mobile usage and we all know that Facebook managed that seismic shift exceptionally well.