Hacker News Reader

But they were less “skill” and more “surveillance”. He had very good usage statistics (which he shouldn’t have had) of these apps through Onavo - a popular VPN app Facebook bought for the purpose of spying on what users are doing outside Facebook.

Instagram was acquired before Onavo.

That’s true, but I remember rumors at the time that Onavo already supplied analytics to FB at the time of instagram purchase.

Google gave me a paywalled link to FTCWatch that supposedly has the details, but I can’t check.

Yes, they did supply data to FB (under the same contracts as everyone else). However, it was only supplied to the sales org, not the product org.

FB acquired IG because it was blowing up in SF and MZ (other leaders too) were looking at how quickly it appeared to be growing and how good it was.

WhatsApp is certainly worth less today than what they paid for it plus the extra funding it has required over time. Let alone producing anything close to ROI. Has lost them more money than the metaverse stuff.

Insta was a huge hit for sure but since then Meta Capital allocation has been a disaster including a lot of badly timed buybacks

Typically when a company is flush with cash, acquisitions become an obvious place to put that money.