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Would you buy Instagram, the second largest photo site on the Internet for a billion dollars? Facebook did. Considering that they can never make back the billion dollars Instagram will cost, what could have possessed Mark Zuckerberg and company to buy it? Well, this is an easy one. People upload about 250,000,000 digital photos to Facebook each day, and Instagram is the next most popular photosharing site. With this acquisition, Facebook now completely owns the photo sharing market – no one else comes close. Want a point of comparison? Instagram has a dozen or so employees and they are going to divide up about $100,000,000 from this sale. Kodak has about 17,000 employees and recently filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. Anyway, Facebook says that it plans to run Instagram as a separate business so you’ll still be able to use Instagram with other social networks like Twitter – which is great if you like to filter your digital photos so they look like you took them in 1970.
About Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with AI strategy, implementation and governance, as well as technology, media and marketing. Named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices in Technology, he is a bestselling author, covers tech and business for Fox 5’s Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN, and writes the popular daily business blog Think About This. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.