Facebook’s Purchase Of Instagram Finalized For Value Of $735M

All of the paperwork has been finalized and the photo-sharing platform Instagram is now officially part of Facebook. The startup’s 16 employees are in the process of being relocated from their San Francisco offices to the Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park.

The original acquisition price was $1billion however Facebook decided to give a big chunk of the 1% equity in the form of stock and because of the stock prices decline in recent months, the final value of the deal works out to $735 million.

Founder Kevin Systrom’s photo-sharing application is likely to reap the benefits of being bought by a company with more than 4,000 employees, including some of the world’s very best software developers.

Facebook released a statement where they have reaffirmed their previous pledge to keep Instagram running as a standalone service. The statement reads as follows:
“As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can’t wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience.”

Today Instagram announced that they have been getting on average, 10 million new members each month and have had more than 5 billion photographs uploaded onto the site since its inception, with a billion uploaded in the last 2 months. This works out at approximately 17 million photos being uploaded each day, however massive as this may sound, it is still leagues away from the 300 million that are uploaded to Facebook on a daily basis.