What’s New in Steam Chat? 9 Features You Should Know About

Steam has always offered a chat function, but it was never as smooth, easy-to-use, and feature-rich as dedicated chat apps like Discord.

The most recent update to Steam has changed all that. But while it may be new and improved, only one question truly matters: Is it worth using? In this article, we explore the answer.

The New Steam Chat Steps Out of Beta

Prior to this new update, Steam found itself in a curious position. It was comfortably the most popular gaming platform but found itself trailing behind Discord in the battle to dominate the social space.

Steam’s old chat client was functional but felt clunky and awkward to use compared to its competitor’s service.

Stream users have been crying out for a revamp for a long time, so the company finally listened to their concerns. But the revamp also has a business benefit; Steam cannot risk Discord using its own app as a distribution platform and becoming a fully fledged rival, so this move helps to keep its opponent in check.

Work began on the new Steam chat client many months ago. It finally entered beta for selected users in June 2018. One month later, it exited beta and became available to everyone.

How to Access the New Steam Chat

You can access Steam Chat in two ways: either via the Steam desktop client or via the web.

At the time of writing, neither the Android nor iOS apps offers the new chat service. Indeed, the Android app hasn’t been updated since April 2017 and the iOS app since June 2016. This places the service at a disadvantage compared to Discord, which boasts a large number of mobile users.

To access the chat feature using the desktop client, open the app, enter your credentials if necessary, and click on Friends and Chat in the lower right-hand corner. The chat client will open in a new window.

To access Steam Chat on the web, go to steamcommunity.com/chat and enter your login details. If it is the first time you’ve logged into the app from the web, Steam will send you an email with a five-digit code that you’ll need to enter for security purposes.

Steam Chat offers an identical experience in both the desktop app and the web app. All the features are present in both versions.

The Best Features in the New Steam Chat

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s take a look at some of the best new features in Steam Chat:

1. Favorites

You can now pin people you frequently interact with to the top of the chat window. This means you can see at a glance whether they are online and message and trade with them in fewer clicks.

To mark a friend or family member as a favorite, simply drag-and-drop their name over the Favorites bar.

To remove someone from the bar, right-click on their profile icon and go to Manage > Remove from Favorites.

2. Categories

Steam has remodeled the “Tag as” feature and rebranded it as Categories.

Categories provide a way for you to manage your chat buddies more effectively. For example, you could make a category for college friends, a category for family members, a category for people you only know through Steam, and so on.

You can add friends to multiple categories and can add multiple friends into a single category at the same time.

You can drag-and-drop people into categories or right-click on their name and go to Manage > Categorize.

3. Inline Content

The old Steam chat client was limited to text. You couldn’t share inline GIFs, images, videos, or any other type of content.

The redesign remedies the problem and makes Steam Chat more akin to Discord, Slack, and other widely-used chat apps.

In addition to images and videos, you can also share links from Spotify, SoundCloud, and other similar services and they will appear inline.

4. Friends List Organization

Steam Chat now displays your friends list in a more intelligent way.

Your friends will be automatically grouped by the game they are currently playing, making it easy to see if you want to jump in and join the party.

All your friends also have a rich presence. Underneath their name, it will show whether they’re currently involved in a live game, whether they are available for matchmaking, and whether they’re gaming with an existing party.

5. Group Chats

At the bottom of your friends list, you’ll see any group chats you’re a part of. You can make a group for any purpose, but Steam has designed them with gaming in mind. You can instantly start multi-person voice chats with other members, and their current game status is prominently displayed.

To create a group, click on the + icon in the Group Chats section of the window and invite the people you want to join you.

Note: All group participants need to be running the latest version of Steam for the invite to work.

6. Channels

Within each group, you can create persistent channels. You could use them for team discussions in multiplayer matches or just to chat about off-topic stuff to avoid clogging up the main group.

To create either a voice or text channel within a group, click on the corresponding link within the chat window.

7. Invisible Mode

The update lets you appear offline while still seeing which of your friends are online. It’s a new feature that complements the existing Away status.

To set yourself as invisible, click on the small arrow next to your username in the upper left-hand corner and select Invisible from the drop-down menu.

8. Chat History

Steam’s servers will retain two weeks of your chat history. The history is present for both one-on-one chats and group chats.

9. Better Security

Steam has completely rewritten the voice chat feature. As a result, all voice chat is encrypted and sent via Steam’s servers rather than peer-to-peer.

The changes mean your IP address is always private, thus masking your physical location from other gamers and helping to prevent network attacks.

Can the New Steam Chat Rival Discord?

If you’re a Discord user who’s reading this article, you’ll probably recognize many of these new features. In much the same way that Instagram keeps stealing Snapchat features, Steam has cherry picked the best things Discord offers and ported them into its own chat app.

But is it enough to bring back some of the millions of users who have already made the jump from Steam to Discord?

In some ways, the new Steam Chat still lags behind its rival. Discord will show a user’s game status regardless of which platform or console they are gaming on; Steam Chat only shows a person’s status if they are playing a Steam game.

Discord also lets you connect several non-gaming apps like Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and Twitch. Steam Chat does not yet have such integrations.

It’s certainly a step in the right direction, but Steam will need to roll out further improvements to Chat before hardcore Discord users switch over for good.

To improve your Steam experience further, check out our article on how to organize your Steam library properly.

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Microsoft Wants to Stop Windows 10 Updates Annoying You

Microsoft is finally doing something about the way Windows 10 handles updates. And it’s using machine learning to accomplish the task. If it’s successful, updating Windows 10 should, in the future, become much less annoying.

Windows 10 can be a little aggressive when installing updates. Unless you know how to manage Windows 10 updates, they’ll come thick and fast, and start installing when you least expect it. Possibly rebooting your PC at an inopportune moment.

A New Way of Updating Windows 10

Microsoft has a plan up its sleeve to prevent this from happening. And it’s being tested right now by Windows 10 Insiders. The key is artificial intelligence which Microsoft hopes will be able to accurately predict when the time is right to install updates.

This predictive model is being tested right now in Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17723 (RS5) and Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18204 (19H1). Which should, all being well, reach ordinary Windows 10 users later this year and in early 2019, respectively.

To Windows 10: NEVER, EVER START AN UPDATE AT AN INCONVENIENT TIME EVER AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. SEND ME A REMINDER IN A WEEK LIKE ALWAYS. BE CAUTIOUS!

— Nem: The Infinity Watcher (@NemRaps) July 23, 2018

In a blog post outlining what’s new in RS5 and 19H1, Windows Insider chief Dona Sarkar asks, “Have you ever had to stop what you were doing, or wait for your computer to boot up because the device updated at the wrong time?” To which everyone replied, “Yes”.

Microsoft has listened to this feedback, so, “if you have an update pending we’ve updated our reboot logic to use a new system that is more adaptive and proactive. We trained a predictive model that can accurately predict when the right time to restart the device is.”

This means that Microsoft will “not only check if you are currently using your device before we restart, but we will also try to predict if you had just left the device to grab a cup of coffee and return shortly after.” Or at least that’s the plan.

Reserving Judgement During Testing

The proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding. So we will reserve judgement on this new way of handling Windows 10 updates until we see it working in the wild. However, it’s fair to say that questions remain about exactly how well it will work.

In the meantime, if you encounter any issues updating Windows, be sure to read our guide to resolving Windows Update problems. And if you’ve had enough of Windows 10 updating altogether here’s how to temporarily turn off Windows Update.

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5 Sites to Download Free and Royalty-Free 4K or Ultra HD Stock Videos

It has become easy to find stock videos that you can download for free and use in your project. But it isn’t as easy to find free and royalty-free stock videos in 4K or Ultra HD (UHD) resolution. Here are your best options so far.

Your first step is probably to check Pixels Video, Pixabay, or one of the other popular sites for copyright-free stock videos. But while those sites have some 4K and UHD videos, not all of them are available in these high resolutions. You can end up wasting a lot of time on these searches.

Instead, one of the sites listed below is guaranteed to get you 4K resolution stock videos to use for free.

Dareful (Web): Hand-picked 4K Videos

Dareful has a small collection of videos in 4K resolution, but it excels by doing what Unsplash did for photos. These are all hand-picked to ensure they are of good quality, so you won’t get bad footage here.

Right now, there are only 36 videos on the site, but they vary in their type. There are nature videos, drone shots, fireworks, bokeh lights, city footage, and so on. Click one, watch a preview, and if you like what you see, download it to your computer.

All of the videos featured on Dareful are under the Creative Commons 4.0 license, which means you can use and adapt them freely, but you will need to give credit where appropriate.

Mitch Martinez (Web): Director of Photography’s Free Videos

Sin City 2. The Hunger Games–Mockingjay. The Man In The High Castle. These are only some of the big movies and TV series that have used the free stock footage released by Mitch Martinez, a Director of Photography.

Over the years, Martinez has shot quite a lot of stock footage on professional RED cameras. He released that footage for anyone to download and use for free, which is how many of the aforementioned names used his videos.

Martinez’s videos are sorted into neat categories like animals, aerial shots, light, landscape, city, particles, water, timelapse, and so on. Click the category, find a video, and you can preview it on Vimeo. Then click the “Download the clip” button to save the full-resolution video on your hard drive. Easy peasy.

Iris 32 / Frederick Tschernutter (Web): Thousands of Free 4K Videos

Like Martinez, Frederick Tschernutter has been shooting the world around him with a RED One and a RED Epic for years. And like Martinez, he decided to give all that footage to the world to use for free with the aforementioned Creative Commons 4.0 license.

Downloading videos from his site, Iris 32, is a slightly tricky process. You need to first visit Tschernutter’s YouTube page to search or browse through his videos. But the YouTube videos aren’t high resolution. To get the 4K version, check the video’s description, where you will find the clip name or a link to the Iris 32 download page. Enter a validation code on Iris 32, accept the Creative Commons license, and save the video to disk.

There are thousands of videos, so use the search feature when you can. But you can also check out Tschernutter’s playlist of favorites to find the best-looking clips.

Harmonic’s Demo Footage (Web): 18 High Quality Videos

If you need a 4K video for a demonstration, Harmonic is where you should head first. The company specializes in streaming Ultra HD video with HDR, and they’ve made a few such clips available for anyone.

You’ll need to register to download these 18 clips, all of which are available in Apple’s ProRes and H.264 codecs. Most of the videos are shot at 60 frames per second. Be warned, these are really large video files, each of them over a gigabyte in size. So make sure you are on a stable and fast internet connection.

Needless to say, you don’t need to actually use Harmonic technology for any of these videos. That said, they do come with a Harmonic watermark in the bottom-right corner.

Free 4K Timelapse (Web): New York City’s Times Square in Timelapse

Max Lee took his trusty Canon 6D to New York City’s Times Square. He set it up and shot a lot of footage for a long time, and eventually turned it into a series of incredible timelapse videos. And you can download them for free.

The whole thing turned into a series of 19 timelapse videos. This is followed by one video in HDR, and a couple from the W Hotel. Lee has also uploaded the original RAW files in case you want to grab those instead of the edited videos.

Lee says his videos can be used to monetize other videos, or in commercial projects, but you will have to add an attribution link.

The One Other Stock Video Site You Should Check

With Pexels or Pixabay, you will have to search for “4K” and hope to get something that fits your needs. But there’s one other such stock video site you should check. Videezy, one of the best places to get media clips for presentations, has an entire dedicated 4K section. Check it out!

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Twitter will suspend repeat offenders posting abusive comments on Periscope live streams

As part of Twitter’s attempted crackdown on abusive behavior across its network, the company announced on Friday afternoon a new policy facing those who repeatedly harass, threaten or otherwise make abusive comments during a Periscope broadcaster’s live stream. According to Twitter, the company will begin to more aggressively enforce its Periscope Community Guidelines by reviewing and suspending accounts of habitual offenders.

The plans were announced via a Periscope blog post and tweet that said everyone should be able to feel safe watching live video.

We’re committed to making sure everyone feels safe watching live video, whether you’re broadcasting or just tuning in. To create safer conversation, we're launching more aggressive enforcement of our guidelines. https://t.co/dQdtnxCfx6

— Periscope (@PeriscopeCo) July 27, 2018

Currently, Periscope’s comment moderation policy involves group moderation.

That is, when one viewer reports a comment as “abuse,” “spam” or selects “other reason,” Periscope’s software will then randomly select a few other viewers to take a look and decide if the comment is abuse, spam or if it looks okay. The randomness factor here prevents a person (or persons) from using the reporting feature to shut down conversations. Only if a majority of the randomly selected voters agree the comment is spam or abuse does the commenter get suspended.

However, this suspension would only disable their ability to chat during the broadcast itself — it didn’t prevent them from continuing to watch other live broadcasts and make further abusive remarks in the comments. Though they would risk the temporary ban by doing so, they could still disrupt the conversation, and make the video creator — and their community — feel threatened or otherwise harassed.

Twitter says that accounts that repeatedly get suspended for violating its guidelines will soon be reviewed and suspended. This enhanced enforcement begins on August 10, and is one of several other changes Twitter is making to its product across Periscope and Twitter focused on user safety.

To what extent those changes have been working is questionable. Twitter may have policies in place around online harassment and abuse, but its enforcement has been hit-or-miss. But ridding its platform of unwanted accounts — including spam, despite the impact to monthly active user numbers — is something the company must do for its long-term health. The fact that so much hate and abuse is seemingly tolerated or overlooked on Twitter has been an issue for some time, and the problem continues today. And it could be one of the factors in Twitter’s stagnant user growth. After all, who willingly signs up for harassment?

The company is at least attempting to address the problem, most recently by acquiring the anti-abuse technology provider Smyte. Its transition to Twitter didn’t go so well, but the technology it offers the company could help Twitter address abuse at a greater scale in the future.

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Google Assistant can now do things automatically at a scheduled time

Back at Google I/O, Google announced two new features for Google Assistant: custom routines and schedules — both focusing on automating things you do regularly, but in different ways.

The first lets you trigger multiple commands with a single custom phrase — like saying “Hey Google, I’m awake” to unsilence your phone, turn on the lights and read the news. Schedules, meanwhile, could trigger a series of commands at a specific time on specific days, without you needing to say a thing.

While custom routines launched almost immediately after I/O, scheduling has been curiously absent. It’s starting to roll out today.

As first noticed by DroidLife, it looks like scheduling has started rolling out to users by way of the Google Home app.

To make a schedule:

• Open the Google Home app
• Go to Settings>Routines
• Create a new routine with the + button
• Scroll to the “Set a time and day” option to schedule things ahead of time

If you don’t see the “time and day” option yet, check back in a day or two. Google is rolling it out over the next few days (generally done in case there’s some bug it missed), so it might pop up without much fanfare.

Want your bedroom lights to turn on every morning at 7 am on workdays? You can do that. Want that song from the Six Flags commercials to play every day at noon to get you over the hump and/or drive your roommates up a wall? Sure! Want to double-check the door lock, dim the downstairs lights and make sure your entertainment center is off at 2 am? If you’ve got all the smart home hardware required, it should be able to handle it.

While a lot of things you might use Google Assistant for can already be scheduled through their respective third-party apps (most smart lights, for example, have apps with built-in scheduling options), this moves to bring everything under one roof while letting you fire off more complicated sequences all at once. And if something breaks? You’ll know where to look.

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NASA’s 3D-printed Mars Habitat competition doles out prizes to concept habs

A multi-year NASA contest to design a 3D-printable Mars habitat using on-planet materials has just hit another milestone — and a handful of teams have taken home some cold hard cash. This more laid-back phase had contestants designing their proposed habitat using architectural tools, with the five winners set to build scale models next year.

Technically this is the first phase of the third phase — the (actual) second phase took place last year and teams took home quite a bit of money.

The teams had to put together realistic 3D models of their proposed habitats, and not just in Blender or something. They used Building Information Modeling software that would require these things to be functional structures designed down to a particular level of detail — so you can’t just have 2D walls made of “material TBD,” and you have to take into account thickness from pressure sealing, air filtering elements, heating, etc.

The habitats had to have at least a thousand square feet of space, enough for four people to live for a year, along with room for the machinery and paraphernalia associated with, you know, living on Mars. They must be largely assembled autonomously, at least enough that humans can occupy them as soon as they land. They were judged on completeness, layout, 3D-printing viability, and aesthetics.

[gallery ids="1681791,1681792,1681829,1681793,1681794,1681828,1681795"]

So although the images you see here look rather sci-fi, keep in mind they were also designed using industrial tools and vetted by experts with “a broad range of experience from Disney to NASA.” These are going to Mars, not paperback. And they’ll have to be built in miniature for real next year, so they better be realistic.

The five winning designs embody a variety of approaches. Honestly all these videos are worth a watch; you’ll probably learn something cool, and they really give an idea of how much thought goes into these designs.

Zopherus has the whole print taking place inside the body of a large lander, which brings its own high-strength printing mix to reinforce the “Martian concrete” that will make up the bulk of the structure. When it’s done printing and embedding the pre-built items like airlocks, it lifts itself up, moves over a few feet, and does it again, creating a series of small rooms. (They took first place and essentially tied the next team for take-home case, a little under $21K.)

AI SpaceFactory focuses on the basic shape of the vertical cylinder as both the most efficient use of space and also one of the most suitable for printing. They go deep on the accommodations for thermal expansion and insulation, but also have thought deeply about how to make the space safe, functional, and interesting. This one is definitely my favorite.

Kahn-Yates has a striking design, with a printed structural layer giving way to a high-strength plastic layer that lets the light in. Their design is extremely spacious but in my eyes not very efficiently allocated. Who’s going to bring apple trees to Mars? Why have a spiral staircase with such a huge footprint? Still, if they could pull it off, this would allow for a lot of breathing room, something that will surely be of great value during year or multi-year stay on the planet.

SEArch+/Apis Cor has carefully considered the positioning and shape of its design to maximize light and minimize radiation exposure. There are two independent pressurized areas — everyone likes redundancy — and it’s built using a sloped site, which may expand the possible locations. It looks a little claustrophobic, though.

Northwestern University has a design that aims for simplicity of construction: an inflatable vessel provides the base for the printer to create a simple dome with reinforcing cross-beams. This practical approach no doubt won them points, and the inside, while not exactly roomy, is also practical in its layout. As AI SpaceFactory pointed out, a dome isn’t really the best shape (lots of wasted space) but it is easy and strong. A couple of these connected at the ends wouldn’t be so bad.

The teams split a total of $100K for this phase, and are now moving on to the hard part: actually building these things. In spring of 2019 they’ll be expected to have a working custom 3D printer that can create a 1:3 scale model of their habitat. It’s difficult to say who will have the worst time of it, but I’m thinking Kahn-Yates (that holey structure will be a pain to print) and SEArch+/Apis (slope, complex eaves and structures).

The purse for the real-world construction is an eye-popping $2 million, so you can bet the competition will be fierce. In the meantime seriously watch those videos above, they’re really interesting.

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Why unskippable Stories ads could revive Facebook

Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second after they appear on our screens.

We’re on the cusp of the shift to Stories. Facebook estimates that across social media apps, sharing to Stories will surpass sharing through feeds some time in 2019. One big reason is they don’t take a ton of thought to create. Hold up your phone, shoot a photo or short video, and you’ve instantly got immersive, eye-catching, full-screen content. And you never had to think.

Facebook CPO Chris Cox at F8 2018 charts the rise of Stories that will see the format surpass feed sharing in 2019

Unlike text, which requires pre-meditated reflection that can be daunting to some, Stories are point and shoot. They don’t even require a caption. Sure, if you’re witty or artistic you can embellish them with all sorts of commentary and creativity. They can be a way to project your inner monologue over the outside world. But the base level of effort necessary to make a Story is arguably less than sharing a status update. That’s helped Stories rocket to over 1.3 billion daily users across Facebook’s apps and Snapchat.

The problem, at least for Facebook, is that monetizing the News Feed with status-style ads was a lot more straightforward. Those ada, which have fueled Facebook’s ascent to earning $13 billion in revenue and $5 billion in profit per quarter, were ostensibly old-school banners. Text, tiny photo, and a link. Advertisers have grown accustomed to them over 20 years of practice. Even small businesses on a tight budget could make these ads. And it at least took users a second to scroll past them — just long enough to make them occasionally effective at implanting a brand or tempting a click.

Stories, and Story ads, are fundamentally different. They require big, tantalizing photos at a minimum, or preferably stylish video that lasts five to fifteen seconds. That’s a huge upward creative leap for advertisers to make, particularly small business who’ll have trouble shooting that polished content themselves. Rather than displaying a splayed out preview of a link, users typically have to swipe up or tap a smaller section of a Story ad to click through.

And Stories are inherently skippable. Users have learned to rapidly tap to progress slide by slide through friends’ Stories, especially when racing through those with too many posts or that come from more distant acquaintances. People are quick with the trigger finger the moment they’re bored, especially if it’s with an ad.

A new type of ad blindness has emerged. Instead of our eyes glazing over as we scroll past, we stare intensely searching for the slightest hint that something isn’t worth our time and should be skipped. A brand name, “Sponsored” label, stilted product shot, or anything that looks asocial leads us to instantly tap past.

This is why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg scared the hell out of investors on the brutal earnings call when she admitted about Stories that “The question is, will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? And we honestly don’t know.” It’s a radically new format advertisers will need time to adopt and perfect. Facebook had spent the past year warning that revenue growth would decelerate as it ran out of News Feed ad inventory, but it’d never stressed the danger as what is was: Stories. That contributed to its record-breaking $120 billion share price drop.

Facebook loses $120 billion in market cap after awful Q2 earnings

The shift from News Feed ads to Stories ads will be a bigger transition than desktop ads to mobile ads for Facebook. Feed ads looked and worked identically, it was just the screen around them changing. Stories ads are an entirely new beast.

Stories Ads Are A Bigger Shift Than Web To Mobile

There is one familiar format Stories ads are reminiscent of: television commercials. Before the age of TiVo and DVRs, you had to sit through the commercials to get your next hit of content. I believe the same will eventually be true for Stories, to the tune of billions in revenue for Facebook.

Snapchat is cornered by Facebook’s competition and desperate to avoid missing revenue estimates again. So this week, it rolled out unskippable vertical video ads it actually calls “Commercials” to 100 more advertisers, and they’ll soon be self-serve for buyers. Snap first debuted them in May, though the six-second promos are still only inserted into its longer-form multi-minute premium Shows, not user generated Stories. A Snap spokesperson said they couldn’t comment on future plans. But I’d expect its stance will inevitably change. Friends’ Stories are interesting enough to compel people to watch through entire ads, so the platforms could make us.

Snapchat is desperate, and that’s why it’s already working on unskippable ads. If Facebook’s apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were locked in heated battle with Snapchat, I think we’d see more brinkmanship here. Each would hope the other would show unskippable ads first so it could try to steal their pissed off users.

But Facebook has largely vanquished Snapchat, which has seen user growth sink significantly. Snapchat has 191 million daily users, but Facebook Stories has 150 million, Messenger Stories has 70 million, Instagram Stories has 400 million, and WhatsApp Stories (called Status) leads with 450 million. Most people’s friends around the world aren’t posting to Snapchat Stories, so Facebook doesn’t risk pushing users there with overly aggressive ads except perhaps amongst US teens.

Instagram’s three-slide Stories carousel ads

That’s why I expect we’ll quickly see Facebook start to test unskippable Stories ads. They’ll likely be heavily capped at first, to maybe one to three per day per user. Facebook took a similar approach to slowly rolling out auto-play video News Feed ads back in 2014. And Facebook’s apps will probably only show them after a friend’s story before your next pal’s, in between rather than as dreaded pre-rolls. Instagram already offers carousel Stories ads with up to three slides instead of one, so users have to tap three times to blow past them.

An Instagram spokesperson told me they had “no plans to share right now” about unskippable ads, and a Facebook spokesperson said “We don’t have any plans to test unskippable stories ads on Facebook or Instagram.” But plans can change. A Snap spokesperson noted that unlike a full thirty-second TV spot, Snapchat’s Commercials are up to six seconds, which matches an emerging industry trend for mobile video ads. Budweiser recently made some six second online ads that it also ran on TV, showing the format’s reuseability that could speed up adoption. For brand advertisers not seeking an on-the-spot purchase, they need time to leave an impression.

By making some Stories ads unskippable, Facebook’s apps could charge more while making them more impactful for advertisers. It would also reduce the creative pressure on businesses because they won’t be forced to make that first split-second so flashy so people don’t fast-forward.

If Facebook makes the Stories ad format work, it has a bright future that contrasts with the doomsday vibes conjured by its share price plummet. Facebook has over 5X more (duplicated) Stories users across its apps than its nearest competitor Snapchat. The social giant sees libraries full of Stories created each day waiting to be monetized.

Stories are about to surpass feed sharing. Now what?

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