A Brief History of Facebook’s Acquisitions on It’s Journey to Perfection

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Facebook is one of the widest known success stories in business and technology. The company has evolved from a free, american networking website for small pool of Ivy League college students to a silicon valley startup and is now multi-billion dollar super power with over a billion users worldwide. In a world of business and technology, it is vital to understand the evolution of their business model.

Since 2010, Facebook has been aggressively acquiring businesses with a goal of owning the perfect platforms for sharing any kind of message to any audience. Early acquisitions included a Malaysian import contact company (Octazen) to create it’s in-depth friend finder, purchases of patents from other social media websites (Friendster), and partnerships with the game developers (Zynga).

Some of Facebook’s major acquisitions have since come from a variety of new avenues. Photo sharing technology (Divvyshot, Instagram), mobile apps (Snaptu), online gift giving technology (Karma), private group and mobile messaging (ShareGrove, Beluga), and the Virtual Reality company Oculus.

Instagram joined Facebook in 2012, but has since been left to it’s own platform unlike the majority of Facebook’s acquisitions. This was also Facebook’s biggest acquisition to date, for both price-point and audience reach (around 30 million). In an interview with CNN Money, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated, “We’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.”

In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR for two billion US dollars (pending a regulatory approval) even though a prototype their VR headset had been released for development. With this purchase, Zuckerberg claimed the company aims connect everyone in the world.

To a certain extent, Facebook’s phenomenal growth can be attributed to the masses of mergers and acquisitions throughout it’s lifetime. Facebook feeds on technology, and as technology becomes a timeless job skill for the future, Facebook is going to be increasingly important for everyone to keep up with.

Infographic by: ?Villanova University Online MBA Program

Facebook Acquisitions

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