Why Facebook Bought Instagram for $1 Billion

While some Instagram hipsters are not too pleased with this news owing to Facebook's rather chilled privacy policy and profiteering ways, this deal made good business sense for strategic reasons more than instant money-making. At its core, Facebook is a photo-sharing site, which makes the hugely-popular photo sharing app, Instagram, a strong competitor, especially with social networking growing around the filtered images uploaded on user's accounts. To date those user accounts stand at 30 million+.

Secondly, while Facebook's mobile app leaves a lot to be desired, Instagram's strength lies in its user-friendly mobile app running on both iOS and, as of last week, Android devices. And have you seen the exploding growth of mobile worldwide? At the end of 2011 there were 6 billion mobile subscriptions with 472 million being smartphones and that figure is expected to grow by 25% in 2012 (IDC.com). Read More TechCrunch