It was announced on Monday that Facebook has purchased the photo-sharing company called Instagram. Instagram is only two-years-old and is based in San Francisco. The deal is for $1 billion in a deal with cash and stocks. Instagram has over 30 million users already. At the end of 2011, Facebook users were uploading close to 250 million photos per day. A study from comScore in 2011 found that people using Facebook spend a fifth of their time on the site looking at photos.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the staff at Instagram will be joining Facebook in an effort to aid the social network add new photo-sharing features and options.
“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family,” Zuckerberg said. “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 will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build 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.”
Zuckerberg noted Facebook is “committed to building and growing Instagram independently,” a sentiment Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom agreed with in a statement.
Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is “committed to building and growing Instagram independently.” This sentiment was echoed by Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram. Those using Instagram will still be able to share photos with other social networking sites aside from Facebook and not have to share the photos with Facebook if they so choose. Zuckerberg said that Instagram users will also be able to keep their friends list different from that of their friends list on Facebook if they so choose.
“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users,” Zuckerberg said. “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”
Instagram has only 13 employees and was founded in 2010. Systrom said that the employees are excited to be joining the ranks of Facebook.
“It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away,” Systrom said. “We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.”