Fun to review how many HN commenters pooh-poohed the acquisition and price back in 2012:
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This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade. YouTube helped to propel Google into content. It also helped to commoditise web video in a massive way: reminiscent of the way which Google commoditised search (YouTube is probably just short of being a byword for online video at this point).
Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services. Photography has been around on the web in meaningful ways for a long time. Flickr lost out to Facebook in the community stakes, and Instagram is doing great in whatever-the-fuck market it's in (the share-to-my-twitter-followers market?), but this is not Google acquiring YouTube.
Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.
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I'm not even sure I'd call Instagram as a photo service anymore. The original core functionality (using it as a digital polaroid and applying a filter) doesn't even seem to be something people use at all anymore. I'm not even sure the majority of the posts are even photos—what between the random images with text above them, screenshots, and the videos.
Instagram was a photo service in a sea of other photo services. Now it's a generic social network where you just post whatever.