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Instagram Is Estimated To Be Worth More Than $100 Billion (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the impressive-feats dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook's Instagram is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, if it were a stand-alone company, marking a 100-fold return for the app purchased in 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. The photo-sharing platform, which reached 1 billion monthly active users earlier this month, will likely help nudge Instagram revenue past $10 billion over the next 12 months, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jitendra Waral wrote in a report Monday. Instagram is attracting new users faster than Facebook's main site and is on track to exceed 2 billion users within the next five years, Waral said. While the social network already has surpassed that milestone, Instagram's audience is younger than its parent, making it more attractive to advertisers. And unlike Facebook, Instagram is still growing in the U.S.

5 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Bubblegram reaches 100 billion chucky tokens by xack · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Been there seen that. We just had the cryptocrash and now we are looking for a new breed of tulip to plant.

  2. A better way to look at valuation by Dzimas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Boeing went out of business tomorrow, there would be a global aircraft shortage. If Instagram unplugged its servers, the world would continue unaffected.

    1. Re:A better way to look at valuation by eepok · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Instagram is how young people communicate, Facebook is how us older people communicate. Killing Instagram today, could mean today's kids when they get into the market and want to communicate with business contacts will probably be split up across many competing services.

      Let's not over-inflate Instagram or Facebook as general "communication". It's how people chat about less-important things. Yes, some conversations have significant value, but neither platform is built to facilitate thoughtful conversation and thus it doesn't happen to the extent people like to think it does.

      If Facebook and Instagram were to die, people would find another place to chat. Communication would continue on, unabated, via email, phone, forums, in-person conversation, and the like.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Headline written by financial incompetents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Instagram is not "worth" $100B. Here's how non-public valuations work (i.e., private companies or business units of public companies that aren't subjected to a stand-alone market trading test): analysts arbitrarily make them up based on what they THINK could POTENTIALLY happen. Especially in tech, rampant lying and fairy tale projections drastically impact the valuations.

    Some generally accepted classic valuation methods would be 2-3x revenues or 3-5x EBITDA. Is Instagram producing $33B in annual revenues? Is it netting $20B in profit?

    Even stand-alone public securities can be wildly over-inflated by the market's trade valuation (market capitalization) because of phony financial wizardry by the Fed.

    This is all Wall Street / Silicon Valley BS