Instagram worth $35 bn, surpasses Twitter

New York: Photo sharing website Instagram, which has more than 16 billion users - a figure much higher than Twitter - has been valued at $35 billion by Citigroup.

This beats Twitter's market cap of $23 billion by a wide margin, wired.com reported

In April 2012, Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion and had about 30 million users.

The app was downloaded over a million times on the day the android version hit and has continued to grow.

In the last nine months, Instagram's user base grew 50 percent, while Twitter could only boost it's active user base by 4.8 percent in the last quarter.

Also, Instagram wants real people and accounts, two days ago, it cleaned up the spam on its network, and deleted millions of fake accounts.

Things could get even better for Instagram, with easy to decipher photos that have a universal appeal, unlike Twitter's feed, with hashtags and location based tweets that need time to understand.