One billion dollars: that is the amount paid by Facebook for the purchase of Instagram. What will happen now to the photos? What reasons might have driven Facebook to the acquisition?
Just a few days ago, we talked about Instagram: now available for Android, the app landed on Google Play and—in a flood, with an astonishing number of downloads within just a few hours—it arrived on the screens of thousands and thousands of smartphones, after the success recorded since its launch on iPhone and the App Store.
However, a few hours ago the news making headlines is the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook: the father of all social networks has purchased the small and young company based on photos enhanced by special filters for the sum of 1 billion dollars.
An impressive price considering that it is a very fresh company, with less than two years of existence but with around thirty million registered users.
It is even more striking when highlighting the fact that we are talking about a start-up composed entirely of a “pool” of human capital made up of only about a dozen employees.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the acquisition came right now when another image-sharing tool – Pinterest – is experiencing rather strong growth. Better to fight on the same ground, that of images, which have always been attention magnets for the average web user.
The news of the acquisition is so fresh that Facebook’s intentions for using the platform are not yet known: many users strongly fear an invasion of their privacy by the platform created by Zuckerberg.
Others instead foresee a future of their own photos being used as advertising by Facebook.
On Twitter, protest is mounting along with the promise that if Facebook’s management is not careful and respectful of Instagram’s “philosophy,” users will unsubscribe from the service en masse.
Perhaps these views are too catastrophic, however, one must say it shouldn’t be surprising that Facebook is a company interested in the strongest applications on mobile devices: it is precisely in the mobile sector that Facebook has not yet found the right way to monetize.
And, as we well know, it is precisely the mobile that is the future of the web and sharing.
It is not about completely shifting the business in this direction but rather trying to attract investors and find the right key to earn also from this perspective. The strength of apps in this sense seems to be the new craving of the “old web” giants.
In short, if small companies attract so many users with a simple and intuitive idea, it’s useless to try to fight them: rather, it seems more expedient to buy them.
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