Facebook buys Instagram for $1 Billion Dollars
A picture is worth $1 Billion dollars according to Facebook’s found Mark Zuckerberg. Over the last 18 months the co-founders (Mike Krieger & Kevin Systrom) have been approached by both Google and Facebook to try and acquire the popular mobile picture app. So what change for Facebook over the last 18 month to make such an agressive offer to acquire Instagram? Mainly it was the fact that the Instragrams user base was becoming its own social network.
Instagram launched in October of 2010 with only 80 users. By December of 2010 Instagram introduced its on the Foursquare platform and reached over 1 million users. July of last year the app had jumped to over 6 million users and over 100 million photos being shared. Instagram has continued to grow with its daily user base growing by nearly 50,000 users a day. Last Novemeber there were reports that the company was nearing a 20 million dollar valuation. Which if you are not familiar with the tech community valuation track record that means your just getting started. By this past January Instagram hit over 15 million registered users. Did we mention this was all just users with iphones!
So here is where the straw broke the camels back! Last week Instagram for Andriod launched. The app instantly acquired another 1 million users within the first 24 hours of the launch and is reported to be on its way to 50 million users very shortly. That’s when Facebook (Zuckerberg) stepped in and made the aggressive acquisition for 1 Billion dollars in cash and stock options! So the next time someone start to say “A picture worth a ……..”, go ahead and fill it in for them and say 1 BILLION dollars!
