In 2012, you probably wouldn't have been out of place if you thought Facebook was crazy for paying $1 billion for photo-posting site Instagram. Facebook was Facebook and was about to go public and Instagram was a place where people put photos of their cats, and themselves posing in front of bathroom mirrors.
Six years later, there's still a lot of that on Instagram. But its acquisition has also been a boon for Instagram, and has made Facebook look pretty smart for acquiring the company for "only" $1 billion.
Instagram could be worth $100 billion today as a stand-alone company, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence. It estimated that Instagram could also surpass $10 billion in annual revenue in the next 12 months, with most of those sales coming from the platform's newsfeed ads.
Instagram has already surpassed 1 billion monthly active users (or almost half the 2.2 billion such users that Facebook claims to have) and its user base is growing at a faster rate than Facebook's. Also, it helps that Instagram's audience tends to be younger than Facebook's, and it's those younger users companies prefer to court with their advertising dollars.
Bloomberg Intelligence also estimated that Instagram could reach that 2 billion monthly average user point within five years.
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