Instagram acquired $1 Billion in 17 Months

When Instagram launched its first app in October 2010, it did not strike most people as the kind of startup that would be acquired for $1 billion.

"We were all like, 'what's the big deal? It's just photos and filters," Brian Blau, a Research Director with the Consumer Technology and Markets Group at Gartner, tells Mashable. But in retrospect, he adds, "There's something to be said around that simplicity."

The app had almost 200,000 users within the first week. By February, it had 1.75 million users, and three months later that number had jumped to 4 million.

By the time Facebook acquired Instagram on Monday, the startup's iPhone app had been downloaded 30 million times. In the same week, its six-day-old Android app hit the 5 million mark.

Meanwhile, Instagram's valuation has shot up with similarly impressive speed. Facebook acquired Instagram just as the startup was closing a round of funding at a $500 million valuation. Instagram's $1 billion price tag means it literally doubled its valuation within a week.

Designers at Visually have compiled an infographic that documents the startup's journey from photo app to $1 billion startup using, appropriately, Instagram photos.

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Facebook Now Owns Your Instagram Content

Instagram, which is now owned by Facebook, is going to continue to allow users to post their images, photos and related content to its platform entirely free of charge. But, Instagram has just informed its users that any content posted to Instagram is essentially the property of Instagram.

Here is how Instagram worded its announcement, which boils down to the fact that anything you post publicly to Instagram can be used by the company in any way it sees fit: "By displaying or publishing ("posting") any content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such content, including without limitation distributing part or all the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services."

So, there you have it. Of course, if anyone is truly surprised by this development, then they're not stopping to think about Instagram's business model and its ramifications. By now, most Internet users understand that if a service is free, like Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn - and so on and so forth - then the product is actually the user and their data. User data in all forms becomes the product that is mined, sold, rented and re-purposed by all levels of advertising and marketing initiatives on behalf of corporate entities around the globe.

User data becomes the cornerstone of the new marketing initiatives that will be served to consumers in the hopes that they will consume even more of the products and services produced by the world's corporations. And that cycle continues indefinitely, until it no longer works.

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