Facebook Buys Instagram App For $1 Billion

Would you pay $1 billion for a popular mobile app? You would if you were Facebook.

Facebook announced yesterday that it has bought Instagram, the wildly-popular photo sharing application, for $1 billion. The app, which has over 30 million subscribers, was originally valued at $500 million. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg assured skeptical critics that Instagram would still remain an independent product from Facebook, and would still be allowed to work with rival companies.

For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

The giant Facebook keeps getting bigger and bigger, but some are concerned that Facebook's sneaky data gathering tactics will leak over into Instagram. Regardless, the billion dollar price tag will be a huge boon to Instagram. It remains to be seen how the merger will affect Instagram's users, and if they'll be subjected to Facebook's data harvesting like we are.