Instagram Acquired by Facebook for $1 Billion

Social media giant purchases photo sharing application

By: David Shear
Published: April 9th, 2012 in Business » World

Facebook pulled the trigger on its largest acquisition to date, purchasing the popular photo-sharing application Instagram for $1 Billion in cash and stock earlier today.

San Francisco-based Instagram, founded 2 years ago, has become one of the most popular iPhone and Android application, with around 30 million users. The service lets users stylize and share photos they take with the camera phone.

Facebook has no plans to change the service model of Instagram. They will continue to allow the application to run on rival operating systems, like Android and likely Windows in the near future, and will continue to allow users to opt out of sharing on Facebook.

“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO wrote on his profile 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.”

Facebook’s much anticipated initial public offering is expected to take place in the coming weeks. Making such a large purchase, one that seems quite over priced considering their user base, is interesting considering the timing.

Here is the full posting regarding the transaction by Zuckerberg on his Facebook page:

“I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. 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.

“We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

“That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

“We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

“These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

“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. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. 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.

“We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.”

Related articles: Facebook, Instagram, IPO, Social Media, Mark Zuckerberg