Doesnt make any sense, I guess nothing makes sense any more especially when it comes to the social networking hype. Here is a company that was started less than 2 years ago with less than 10 employees and today sells for $1 Billion. They dont have a business model or any revenue, but worth $1 Billlion, what do they produce? Nothing. Nah Im not believing the hype on this one, facebook over paid by hundreds of millions of dollars, of course most will disagree because it was "facebook" that bought them. People were saying Instagram was a competitor to facebook? How so, I thought in todays world you can have as many flourishing social networking website as possible, seems to be no limit on how many new companies are started each day. From Entrepreneur.com Here's a quick history of how Instagram grew from a simple idea to a $1 billion acquisition: March 2010: Stanford University grad Kevin Systrom closes a $500,000 seed round from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz while working on a location-based app called Burbn. July 2010: Systrom and Mike Krieger, who also studied at Stanford, begin designing an app for sharing photos. October 2010: Systrom and Krieger launch the Instagram photo-sharing iPhone app with 80 initial users. Systrom uploads the first picture to Instagram. December 2010: Instagram announces full photo support and sharing on Foursquare. The app reaches 1 million registered users. February 2011: Users grow to 1.75 million, sharing more than 290,000 photos daily. The company raises a $7 million financing round led by Benchmark Capital and a group of angel investors including Twitter's Jack Dorsey. Instagram releases a real-time API that allows universal sharing on any service. July 2011: Instagram's registered users top 6 million. More than 100 million photos have been shared. August 2011: Facebook says it's getting ready to unveil a series of its own photo filters, reportedly after a failed attempt to purchase Instagram. October 2011: One year after launch, Instagram's number of users continues to explode, with nearly 50,000 people signing up for the service each day, Systrom says. November 2011: News reports hint that the company is seeking a $20 million valuation as it puts together another round of funding. At TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing, Systrom says the startup's most difficult day was its first, when the site crashed multiple times. "But it turns out people are very forgiving for something they love a lot," he says. January 2012: From 1 million registered users at the beginning of 2011, Instagram grows to more than 15 million users. On average, 60 photos are uploaded every second, the company says. April 2012: Sequoia Capital is said to be leading a $50 million funding round for the company, valuing Instagram at $500 million. The company unveils its Instagram for Android app and says it now has more than 30 million users. Facebook announces that it has agreed to purchase Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock.
Dennis K. Berman Remember this day. 551-day-old Instagram is worth $1 billion. 116-year-old New York Times Co.: $967 million.
It's sort of a silly, defensive acquisition; however, photos are a major part of facebook profiles. I can see it maybe being a break even acquisition for facebook. And seriously, what else are they going to spend their money on. How much innovation can they really do. They've expanded around the globe already. They haven't done anything new with their business model.
Maybe FB sees that entry into this field (social networking) ain't so hard. Better to buy them out than risk competing with them.
This is the way you make money my friend, not day trading in stocks. To the young kiddos out there, want to really make good money?go learn programming, get a good developer and monetize the product, thats where the real money making frontier is.
I think the market is completely saturated with ideas. It seems everyone is running to this area because of where the money is, that doesnt last forever, right now between Apple and the Android market there are close to a million apps, I know there are repetitive ones for both markets but every week there are hundreds more being added...I guess these kiddos dont even have to go to school, they can just learn programming at around 8 or 9 and start creating apps by 12 and be rich by 15, isnt that the american dream.
Newscorp bought Myspace for half a billion.. myspace had many more eyeballs at the time than instagram has today. Sold a few years later for 5% of the purchase price.
I installed instagram today. I palayed with it for a minute. I noticed that there are at least 10 apps, available doing the same thing. I bet there will be 100 more in less than a month. It is really an easy app. Just image processing. Nothing else.