Low-key, underground photo-sharing app Instagram went mainstream on Monday, as the year-old startup was bought by social networking giant Facebook for one billion dollars in cash and stock.
As Reuters reports:
Despite a loyal and active following, Instagram lacks any significant revenue sources. The start-up, with roughly a dozen employees based in San Francisco, reportedly closed a $50 million funding round last week from investors including Sequoia Capital that valued the company at $500 million, according to the technology blog AllThingsD.com.
Facebook, which is expected to launch a $5 billion initial public offering in May, will acquire Instagram’s entire team.
“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,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”
Instagram’s 30 million users, already crushed by the app’s new-found availability on Android advices, reacted with despair to the revelation that their favorite photo software was going to be used by the masses:
[View the story “Facebook buys Instagram, hipsters react” on Storify]
Facebook buys Instagram, hipsters react
A roundup of enraged Instagram users expressing their disgust.
Storified by Nate Jones · Mon, Apr 09 2012 15:08:13
For the curious, here are some other things you can buy for the amount of money Facebook paid for Instagram. Tech bubble, what tech bubble?
- The New York Times ($967M)
- One billion McDonald’s Snack Wraps
- Two Subway sandwiches a day for the next 247,000 years
- 22,200 Lexus convertibles
- One hundred thousand bottles of 50-year-old Scotch
- The Cincinnati Bengals (worth $850M)