Facebook Acquires Instagram For A Reported One Billion Dollars

In a public wall post, Mark Zuckerburg announced that Facebook has purchased Instagram and that the Instagram team will be joining Facebook.  This is a unique acquisition for Facebook, as they are not only purchasing a leading application, but the entire user base as well.  TechCrunch reports that the Instagram price tag wasn’t cheap either, coming in at “approximately $1 billion in cash and stock.”

We’re excited to announce something very big: Instagram + Facebook bit.ly/Hslpv2

— Instagram (@instagram) April 9, 2012

The big question however is: Will Instagram merge into some Insta-book or Facesta-gram hybrid?  Not likely.  Zuckerburg stated the importance of keeping Istagram an independent entity. by saying:

“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.”

Just last week Instagram launched their Android app, an app that sky-rocked up to the top of the charts.  Through March 2012, Instagram maintained 27 million users, making it the top photo sharing application.

For more information see Mark Zuckerburg’s wall post, or the official blog post from Instagram.

Postscript by Matt McGee: Some additional background on Instagram comes from two tweets posted this morning by Experian Hitwise:

• Twitter sent more traffic to Instagram in March than Facebook did, but Facebook sent more a higher percentage of new visits to Instagram.
• Instagram was the No. 3 photo site in the U.S. in March with more than 10 million visits. And traffic has exploded lately, up more than 1,000 percent since December 2011.

About The Author

Greg Finn

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.