If they see any others as existential threats, yes, all of them. Facebook’s current valuation is $599 billion. Instagram was roughly $1 billion at the time it was acquired.

Facebook could acquire 100 more Instagrams and have every single one of them fail - or even shut them down - without all that much dilution.

(Cisco and EMC from 1990-2010 are successful examples of this strategy. See DataDomain, Isilon, Cerent, and arguably Crescendo for example acquisitions.)

Seems like it.

Exhibit A: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/facebook-acquires-anonymou...

Exhibit B: https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/02/facebook-shuts-down-tbh-...

Probably. I loathe Facebook as both a product and company, but I have to give them credit: they're smart and they know what they're doing. They're not going to be caught out easily by the usual "disruption".

Facebook knows the lifecycle of social media networks, and knows that the way to stay in front of the inevitable decay is to watch like a hawk for the New Thing and either buy it (Instagram, WhatsApp) or clone it and stomp it with network effects (Snapchat).

Don't they just have to look out for popular social media apps with large userbases? It's surely not rocket science.

The complicated bit is heading off anti-trust regulators.

There’s lot of popular social media apps now or from before. Most don’t succeed the way Instagram and Whatsapp have. So it’s not as simple as just picking any. Yahoo picked up Tumblr, look how that turned out. Look how Snapchat is doing right now money-wise. Though of course that’s tougher to say since Instagram had a direct effect on hurting Snapchat.

Did anything get better after acquisition by Yahoo pre-Oath? I'm actually fine with trying different things and failing, but my spotty memory is Yahoo batted 0.000, Flickr surviving Yahoo by being acquired by smugmug seems like a moral victory more than anything as a fan of Flickr.

There will be more, but I'm not convinced there will be "many." We seem to be hitting a peak of social networks, even if it's only a local maxima.

I feel like there will be less social networks and more things that accidentally become social networks. Something like reddit. I'm sure there are more examples. Things more organic.

Imgur is a major example.

Either scoop up (IG, WhatsApp, tbh etc...) or crush through imitation (Snap).

Well TBH snap didn't offer a good user experience, hence when IG did it in a slightly more user friendly way they got most of snap's users

Same with vine and videos on ig