• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 23, 2016

Making for a more laid-back experience, Instagram on Thursday debuted “Picked for You” channels featuring videos grouped by users’ preferred topics and interests.

“As video continues to grow, we’re adding new channels to Explore,” the Facebook unit notes in a new blog post. And video viewership is growing on Instagram. The total time users spent watching video increased 150% over the past six months alone, according to internal figures.

More broadly, Instagram is holding its own against Snapchat and other social rivals.

Indeed, the network has officially surpassed more than 500 million monthly active users -- more than 300 million of whom use the app daily, it announced earlier this week.

Of course, only about 100 million of those monthly active users live stateside. Still, the new figures mean that Instagram’s monthly user base more than doubled over the past two years, and it added its last 100 million active users faster than the previous 100 million.

On average, Instagram now sees about 95 million photos and videos shared per day, and about 4.2 billion” likes” per day.