It even ended WhatsApp’s one existing act of monetization (after the first year, you paid 99¢ per year for the service). When Facebook agreed to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp less than two years later, reasonable people might have assumed that the app would soon be laden with advertising. Their reasons ran the gamut from the aesthetic intrusion to privacy issues to their feeling that it was a waste of engineering resources better invested in building a great product. In June 2012, when WhatsApp was still an independent company, cofounders Jan Koum and Brian Acton published a blog post that explained why they didn’t put ads inside their app. WhatsApp would have needed to find a business model Think back far enough, for example, and you might remember a period when Twitter was ascendant and Facebook started to look like it. When Facebook hasn’t bought a rival, its alternative has often been to copy it. But it’s tough to imagine Instagram being anywhere near as much of a cash machine as it swiftly became as an extension of Facebook. Had Instagram not sold itself to Facebook, it would have needed to come up with its own ad tech, hired its own salespeople, and generally gone through a process more akin to the one that its still-independent competitor Snap had to undertake. As James Quarles, then the head of Instagram’s business operations, told me in 2017, “When you place an ad, you can say, ‘I’d like this to be on Facebook, Instagram, or both,’ which is very convenient.” But once it did, it was able to piggyback on top of Facebook’s powerful existing ad platform, giving it an unbeatable shortcut to prosperity. but it might not have been a money machineįor a time after the acquisition, Instagram didn’t seem in a rush to monetize itself through advertising. News stories and deep dives such as Sarah Frier’s No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram and Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story, show that Zuckerberg visualized exactly that-which is why he made sure that Instagram was a part of Facebook’s portfolio, not a rival. Still, it’s easy to imagine Systrom and Krieger turning a stand-alone Instagram into something massive and enduringly popular. Having Facebook-scale resources unquestionably helped Instagram grow as big and as fast as it did. In 2017, Systrom told me that Instagram had the autonomy to pursue its own vision, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg’s roles being like that of board members.
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Until they quit in 2018-reportedly because the free rein they’d enjoyed had been increasingly curtailed-the duo shaped the experience that just kept attracting more users. Had it botched the acquisition, it wouldn’t be under fire now for owning Instagram, and spinning it back out wouldn’t make the market more competitive.īut Facebook succeeded with Instagram in part by leaving its cofounders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, in charge. And Facebook did pull off a rare feat in Silicon Valley: It bought something popular and made it even more popular. When Facebook bought Instagram, it had about 2% of the users it has today, just 13 employees, no revenue and virtually no infrastructure of its own. The Instagram you see today is the Instagram that Facebook built, not the app it acquired. And it led me to wonder: How different would the tech industry be if Facebook hadn’t bought them in the first place-whether because the FTC didn’t allow it, someone else struck a deal first, or their founders simply chose to remain independent?
Still, just considering the idea of Instagram and WhatsApp being spun out raises intriguing what-if scenarios. Like Microsoft, Facebook may evade being dismantled. Eventually, Microsoft agreed to a settlement that put restrictions on its business practices that no consumer would have noticed.
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That would have changed software history. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft to be split into two companies: one to make operating systems and one to make apps such as Office. It might be years before it’s clear what all this means for the company-and even after it seems to be clear, it might not be. After all, the closest parallel in recent memory is the Department of Justice’s 1990s antitrust suit against Microsoft, which was spawned by that company’s bundling of its Internet Explorer browser with Windows.
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