It’s not often that a company with essentially no revenue sells for nearly a billion dollars, but that’s just what happened when Facebook wrote the largest check for a social media network ever this year. So what inspired the Facebook founder’s record-breaking purchase of Instagram?
For starters, Instagram has more than 80 million users with more than 4 billion user-published photos posted – impressive stats for this two-year-old start-up. Many believe that Zuckerburg (Facebook’s founder) was threatened by Instagram’s growing user base and degree of service overlap. After all, what Facebook users like most about the network is the ability to share photos. Once Instagram, which was developed exclusively for mobile users, began adding social media messaging capabilities, they were in essence attacking Facebook’s weak spot – the strength of its mobile app, which most find to be mediocre at best.