is it just me or does that round of financing led by Sequoia a week ago smell kinda fishy? Instagram in the thick of negotiations with Facebook and Google look for a way to up the value of the company. tell Sequoia about their plans and Sequoia walks away with 100% gain within a week.
I was thinking the same exact thing, Sequoia Capital makes a $60 million investment just a week ago that values the company at $500 million and a week later its bought for $1 Billion.
I really do not get the value of this company. They say that people have taken about 1 billion pictures with instagram, and facebook is paying $1 billion dollars for it. Thats about $1 per pic taken. That just seems a little overvalued. Even at $500 million its too much for a shitty little app.
well instagram has what 80 million users? facebook makes $4 per user in revenue. 320 million x5 multiple and you get 1.6 billion. a bit of a stretch since mobile users make much less revenue, but i'm sure investment bankers involved in the deal threw out similar numbers. problem is, instagram doesn't appear to have any source of revenue at the moment. not sure how facebook plans to monetize the investment.
They say the rate it is growing it would pose a risk to facebook in the future so facebook bought that out. Heck they might have been trading on higher valuation than apple in 5 years....
o my bad, the article i skimmed through for users was estimating android users. 30 mil ios + however many they get from android. gonna be interesting to see how facebook tries to monetize instagram.