Facebook Buying Instagram for $1 Billion
Facebook wants to buy Instagram, and it’s going to cost them a large sum of cash!
According to the New York Times, “Facebook, the world’s largest social network, said it had agreed to buy Instagram, the popular mobile-centric photo-sharing service, for $1 billion in cash and stock, giving it a stronger
- Kevin Systrom (Instagram CEO) – image via Forbes
foothold on mobile devices. It would be Facebook’s largest acquisition to date by far.
“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote on his Facebook page. “Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.”
Instagram is a social network built around cellphone photos. It lets people add quirky filters and effects to their snapshots and share them with friends, who can “like” and comment on them. The service has been something of a rising star in the start-up world. Barely two years old, it has attracted close to 30 million users, even though it worked only on iPhones until last week, when it released an Android version of its app.
Despite Instagram’s tremendous traction — more than 5 million photos are uploaded each day — the company, which is based in San Francisco, is still tiny. For much of its existence it has had fewer than seven employees, and it only recently topped 10. By way of comparison, Foursquare, another cellphone-focused social network, has nearly 100 employees serving 15 million users.
Facebook has been interested in Instagram for some time. In early 2011, Mr. Zuckerberg reached out to Instagram to discuss possibly purchasing the company, but Mr. Systrom chose to keep it independent and focus on expanding it, two Facebook engineers who asked not to be named said in August. At the time Instagram had less than 7 million users.”
To continue reading this entire article visit the NYTimes.com
