When Facebook paid $1 billion in cash and stock for Instagram in April of 2012, a lot of people thought Zuckerberg and his team were crazy. While Instagram's app for Android was downloaded over a million times on the first day it was released that year, those metrics still paled in comparison to the over one billion active users Facebook had by the third quarter of 2012. However, if we fast-forward to the present, it actually looks like Facebook got a great deal. With over 700 million users, Instagram has grown to over twice the size of Twitter. Not only has Instagram rolled out highly targeted advertising options throughout their platform, but they've expanded well beyond photos and filters. Read the rest of this entry →