Why Facebook wants Snapchat so badly

Facebook is an advertising company, and the success of the social media company relies on its one billion+ users being engaged with the content on the site. For facebook, two very worrying trends have caught investor's attention: they are running out of ways to pack more ads into user's newsfeeds, and they are losing users in the teenage demographic.  Teenagers may not make many purchase decisions, but they are influential on their parents purchases, and more importantly, they represent the future of Facebook users. Snapchat may only be two years old, but it has already made a significant dent in Facebook's young userbase, and its growth has come from precisely the area Facebooks losses stem from. Even more impressive, according to a Pew survey, 26% of adults between 18 and 29 say they use the messaging service. The purchase would stop the bleeding for Facebook (an expensive bandaid, but still) and give it another avenue on which to serve ads to its customers.  Whether or not the price was too low or too high, Facebook has a weakness, and Snapchat has been exploiting it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/11/13/facebook-wouldve-bought-snapchat-for-3-billion-in-cash-heres-why/