In France, they have the can-can. In Japan, Geisha. In England, we have Morris dancing. (Taken with instagram)
Is Instagram Worth A Billion Dollars?
When Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars, the internet world sat up and paid attention. Analysts tried to see where the value of instagram was. In it’s userbase? Most Instagram users have a Facebook account. In it’s employees? Well, there’s only a dozen or so employees at Instagram, so that puts their value pretty high. In fact, Instagram doesn’t even have a revenue stream: it received a bunch of funding from venture capitalists but has no advertising or paid accounts.
So has Facebook acquired Instagram to kill off a rival? Not likely. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facbook wants to run Instagram independently and keep developing it.
Why Instagram is hot is that it connects users in ways that Facebook doesn’t. In the same way that Twitter doesn’t require you to know a user before you follow them, Instagram has a passive follwing model: you can follow anyone unless they explicitly block you. Facebook, on the other hand, has an active friending process: you request a friendship and the other user has to confirm it. it’s doubtless due to the quantity of information available on facebook, that people do not want to share with the whole world, but it’s an interesting distinction.
So, you have a network of followers and followees, each probably with a Facebook account but not necessarily connected on Facebook. Is this something Facebook is looking into - connecting users and brands without needing an active agreement from the user? Perhaps.
But the main reason instagram is so hot is to do with mobile. Facebook’s mobile site is pretty good, but there are complaints that their iOS and Android apps are clunky. Facebook has grown rather unwieldy, adding all sorts of new functionality, and while the desktop version of the site can grow to accommodate that, the mobile apps struggle to fit it all in. Perhaps a fragmentation of Facebook, using Instagram as the model, is on the cards.
Or perhaps Facebook just think Instagram is a business that will grow and grow and can be sold on again in 5 years time for $5 billion.
