Instagram is worth $100 billion, and life is meaningless

LOL remember when we all thought Facebook's 2012 acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion was bananas? LMAO! Now Instagram is worth $100 billion! Ha ha ha!!

An analyst published the estimate for Bloomberg Intelligence on Monday. That's a...wait for it...100-fold return on Facebook's investment in the little photo sharing app with the square pics and some color filters. Turns out you can put a (very high) price on being cool.

Here's some more fun: Instagram will likely hit 2 billion users over the next five years. Monetized content for all!

In 2012, the internet balked at the price tag of the sale, and mourned the death of the platform that we thought a Facebook acquisition would bring. Well, we were half right, y'all. It turns out that the app that catalyzed a generation's obsession with nostalgia is a cash cow, so we got that one wrong. But the acquisition did change Instagram forever.

Instagram is far from the polished but weirdly personal and authentic walled garden it once was. Now, there are business accounts and ads everywhere you look on (including shoppable stories and photos). According to Bloomberg, it will account for 16 percent of Facebook's revenue in the next year. And that's even before Instagram starts seeing returns on IGTV, the YouTube competitor it launched in June.

Despite the monetization invasion, Instagram has maintained its cool kid rep, remaining a favorite platform amongst that most coveted of demographics, teens. That's thanks to a lot of the features that Instagram has stolen from Snapchat, like stories and lenses. But probably also because, true to its roots, Instagram still has the ability to make us look damn good in pics.

Cheers to $100 billion. I'll take my death of the internet tears straight up.