The social network announced Monday that it is buying photo-sharing service Instagram, a two year-old San Francisco based company that has attracted more than 30 million users, for a $ 1 billion in a cash and stock deal.
The deal marks an attempt by Facebook to maintain dominance in an area that has proved one of its stickiest and most popular features: photo sharing. At the end of the last year, Facebook users were uploading more than 250 million photos a day, on average, according to Facebook’s filling with the SEC. The social network’s members also spend nearly a fith of their time on the site browing photos, a 2011 comScore study found.
Instagram has, in just two short years, developed an offering that has proved attractive and compelling to a diverse group of users, and Facebook no doubt hopes to capitalize on the photo sharing app’s expertise, particularly in mobile.
In an update posted on his Facebook profile, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that the talented team at Instagram will be joining Facebook to help the social network add new features to its photo-sharing offerings.
For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family, the Facebook CEO explained. Now, we’ll be able to wrok even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people basaed on your interests.
Zuckerberg also wrote, We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to buid 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.
