As Facebook When Mark Zuckerberg took over Instagram in spring 2012, the photo-sharing app had just 50 million users and was not making any money. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg decided to spend 1 billion dollars on the up-and-coming competitor anyway was met with scepticism by some, while others thought it was a smart move to get in before Instagram really took off. In hindsight, the latter were right, as the following chart shows.
The photo-sharing app now has 1 billion monthly active users, the Advertising business is started well and Instagram Stories has become first line of defence from Facebook against Snapchat has become. One can only imagine how much Instagram would be worth today, but when you consider that Snapchat's parent company, Snap, is valued at more than 16 billion dollars with a fraction of Instagram's users, it's fair to say that Instagram's acquisition price was a billion dollars well spent.
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