One of the highest profile liquidity events in the first half of 2012 was Facebook’s deal to acquire Instagram for $1 billion. The popular mobile photo-sharing service should fit well into Facebook’s growth strategy as a public company, but its eye-popping valuation — more than that of the New York Times, for those keeping score at home — is made more extraordinary by the fact that social media sensation Instagram, at the time the deal was announced, was run by only 13 employees.
Setting aside questions of unique strategic value for the moment, what could possibly make Instagram worth ten figures? Brand recognition, goodwill, user loyalty, mushrooming usage metrics, sure — but perhaps most importantly, a mountain of intellectual property. My quick-and-dirty assessment of the value of Instagram IP, based on pure speculation with no inside knowledge, produced the following taxonomy:
- Technology, consisting at a minimum of a consumer-facing iPhone app and the server-side innards that handle connections and communications with other users and social networks. Most social media sites and services, at their heart, are gigantic databases connected to Web servers that render the stored data as Web pages, images and other content.
- Branding Elements including the Instagram name, logo, domain names, trademarks and other identifiers, which nowadays can include everything from Twitter handles to Facebook pages and even vanity domains.
- User database containing personal information from more than 30 million registered users
- User-generated content: In Instagram’s case, a vast repository of more than one billion photos contributed by those users, not to mention the 81 comments per second posted on those photos — accounting for the lion’s share of value of Instagram IP in my opinion
- Proprietary content and design: Admittedly modest by comparison, but it would do the designers a disservice not to give a nod to the app’s user interface.
