Is Facebook buying out the competition?
You may have heard of Instagram before but not taken much notice of this social mobile photo sharing app until recently. On April 9th Facebook bought out the company consisting of 13 employees for a staggering 1 billion dollars in cash, making it the largest financial acquisition in Facebook’s history……
“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”
So just why did Facebook pay almost double for Instagram when it was rumoured to be valued at 500 million dollars just a few days before. The answer could be that it was beat at its own game of mobile photo sharing.
Mark Zuckerburg went onto comment “But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.” Was Facebook simply buying out the competition? After launching on Android on the 3rd of April and adding 5 million users in 6 days, it became clear that it wasn’t just an app, but a competitive social network.
James Pearce, head of mobile developer relations for Facebook recently commented “Had Facebook been built today, it would be mobile.” Instagram has grown to be the largest solely mobile social network around and Facebook could learn a great deal from it, Facebook has often struggled to make the transition to mobile. “We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products,” Mark Zuckerberg said.
Instagram is a free app and allows users to apply 17 filters to the pictures they have taken before uploading them. It has proven hugely popular with over 30 million users uploading 5 million photos every day making for a total of over a Billion photos shared.
Instagram Timeline
October 2010 – Instagram is launched
December 2010 – Hits 1 million users
September 2011 – Hits 10 million users
March 2012 – Instagram has topped 25 million users, becoming the largest mobile-based social network in the world, according to a report.
April 3rd – Instagram for android released, Downloaded More Than 1 Million Times in 24 Hours, 5 million downloads in 6 days
April 9th – 551 days old sold for a billion dollars
April 10th – Instagram leaps to the number one spot in the iOS App Store. It’s the first time it has hit the top spot in Apple’s free-app catalogue
April 12th – Hits 30 million users
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