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Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

bloomberg.com

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Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#371

Post by ionised »

J5892 wrote: post #194
coldtea wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertising is a very legitimate way of making money Yes, just not a way to make something that improves our lives. Or even if you manage to make something that improves our lives, advertising is an incentive to pervert it and hold it back (e.g. you create a social network so people from all over the world can meet, then ads make you cripple it, force feed BS to them, milk them with spam, exploit their private data…

How would you monetize it without ads? Instagram would have died an early death if you had to pay for it, and hiding certain features behind a pay wall would alienate 90% of the users.

> Instagram would have died an early death if you had to pay for it

I honestly don't think that would be a loss for humanity.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#372

Post by austenallred »

mac01021 wrote: post #350
austenallred wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I spend $100,000/month advertising on Facebook and Instagram, so it depends on what your definition of “bubble” is

What kind of product/service are you selling? Have you seen much indication that that has been money well spent?

Yes, the ROI is positive for us, as it is for most advertisers that continually dump in big budget dollars. It’s easy to measure that stuff.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#373

Post by xkjkls »

brisance wrote: post #352
xkjkls wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the best tech acquisition of all time. It's either that or YouTube. I guess you could argue for Apple acquiring NeXT, but that's an acquisition that isn't really able to be measured in the same way.

Why not since Bloomberg is now pulling numbers out of its ass? A billion MAU with projected $10 billion annual revenue gives a 10x annual revenue valuation. Apple has long surpassed a billion iOS units sold, and annual revenue is $230 billion, give or take, so it should be worth $2.3 trillion. Not bad for an inflation adjusted acquisition worth $654 million.

There are a lot of reasons why a fast growing business like Instagram should be trading at higher multiples than Apple.

Also the value in NeXT came from Steve Jobs, not NeXT itself.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#374

Post by xkjkls »

FireBeyond wrote: post #343
xkjkls wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the only other point of buying a Patek other than showing it off is to keep it as something to give away to your unappreciative son

I like the quote about a Patek on Succession, "And it's amazingly accurate - every time you look at your wrist, you know -exactly- how rich you are."

Haha, that's great.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#375

Post by xkjkls »

mygo wrote: post #318
xkjkls wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but 7 engineers at that growth rate means your entire team is just going to be devoted to beating all of the scaling fires. That leaves little time for other product improvements that might enable more growth. FB was pretty slow to monetize Instagram, and they still had hired 100s of people pretty quickly after the acquisition.

It’s quite possible to run a high-traffic app with a small staff if you have the right engineering talent and developed the infrastructure thinking about scale from the start. Before facebook bought Whatsapp they only had 5 employees. But they had the best engineers for the task at hand. In fact they’re famous for handling 2 million TCP connections on a single server due to much of their engineering decisions (includ…

WhatsApp had 55 employees not 5.

And additional features are going to add massive complexity and decrease your ability to scale relatively quickly. Sure, with the right engineering you might be able to run a relatively light operation if you have a feature-set well thought out, but as soon as you want to add any other thing-a-mo-bob to the operation it gets much harder.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#376

Post by xkjkls »

macintux wrote: post #242
xkjkls wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think given their UI/model it is pretty difficult to have any long form discussion on Instagram. The "news" part of the newsfeed as always been FB's killer app. Or at least that and event planning, though I think it's not impossible for Instagram to develop a product around that.

Interesting, I've found Facebook's event management for large groups to be terrible. Our Jeep group has largely migrated from Meetup to Facebook, and the impact on event coordination has been largely negative.

It's by far the best because everyone is on it though -- that shouldn't be understated.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#377

Post by skinnymuch »

mygo wrote: post #318
xkjkls wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but 7 engineers at that growth rate means your entire team is just going to be devoted to beating all of the scaling fires. That leaves little time for other product improvements that might enable more growth. FB was pretty slow to monetize Instagram, and they still had hired 100s of people pretty quickly after the acquisition.

It’s quite possible to run a high-traffic app with a small staff if you have the right engineering talent and developed the infrastructure thinking about scale from the start. Before facebook bought Whatsapp they only had 5 employees. But they had the best engineers for the task at hand. In fact they’re famous for handling 2 million TCP connections on a single server due to much of their engineering decisions (includ…

WhatsApp had 50+ employees and made only tens of millions from their $1 fee. Where are you getting $1B from? It was never remotely close to $1B. FB publicly posted Whatsapp revenue from before the acquisition. It was a pittance.

Whatsapp also only had a couple hundred million users back in 2014. So they’d have no way to make a billion even if they charged everyone. Which they didn’t. They barely charged anyone.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#378

Post by skinnymuch »

xkjkls wrote: post #375
mygo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s quite possible to run a high-traffic app with a small staff if you have the right engineering talent and developed the infrastructure thinking about scale from the start. Before facebook bought Whatsapp they only had 5 employees. But they had the best engineers for the task at hand. In fact they’re famous for handling 2 million TCP connections on a single server due to much of their engineering decisions (includ…

WhatsApp had 55 employees not 5. And additional features are going to add massive complexity and decrease your ability to scale relatively quickly. Sure, with the right engineering you might be able to run a relatively light operation if you have a feature-set well thought out, but as soon as you want to add any other thing-a-mo-bob to the operation it gets much harder.

Also, they didn’t make close to $1B. More like 1% of that in the year before Facebook acquired them. If they actually made that much money they’d have more staff dealing with that.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#379

Post by skinnymuch »

misiti3780 wrote: post #285
csomar wrote: post #60

I remember the outrage when Zuckerberg bought Insta for $1bn. The Internet was filled with bubble-theorist. Say what you want about Zuckerberg but the guy was well ahead of his time and could see how things would evolve and what tick with people brains.

or he just got very lucky. it only seems like he was "ahead of his time" because the story worked out - when you look at other acquisitions like say Oculus or Parse, I would argue it seems quite the opposite.

Whatsapp has over 1.5B users now. Facebook paid for it mostly with stock back in 2014. That was a solid buy.

Oculus while not a huge success was also only bought for a few billion. Not a bad loss. Parse wasn’t bought for that much. It might’ve not been a loss either.

When two of their bigger acquisitions are slam dunk successes or just successes, that’s a pretty good record.

Re: Instagram Is Estimated to Be Worth More Than $100B

#380

Post by skinnymuch »

thanatropism wrote: post #188
csomar wrote: post #60

I remember the outrage when Zuckerberg bought Insta for $1bn. The Internet was filled with bubble-theorist. Say what you want about Zuckerberg but the guy was well ahead of his time and could see how things would evolve and what tick with people brains.

To be fair, the whole thing could still prove to be the mother of all bubbles. For one: we still don't really really understand network effects. There's huge value to being Facebook (you're forced to be there because all your friends are there and most nowhere else), but people also switch platforms for reasons that are not excellently understood. And when I say bubble I don't mean this or that company -- Silly Valle…

I have to echo austenallred. Depending on the month, I’ll spend a similar amount on Facebook and Instagram ads and get good results from them. Instagram‘s ad platform and revenue keep growing at a crazy pace too. They are also the only two social networks I advertise on.
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