Twitter has talked to Bieber-backed Shots: Source
Twitter has talked about an acquisition of Shots, the selfie app backed by singer Justin Bieber, a source close to Shots told CNBC on Tuesday. — Twitter's acquisition plans became the subject of hot speculation on Monday …
Context & Ripple Effects
Shots launched as 'Shots Of Me' in November 2013, a selfie-sharing app whose most distinctive asset was Justin Bieber's backing and his ability to drive teen adoption. The CNBC report lands amid a stretch of Twitter deal chatter: the company had previously weighed buying the mobile photo app Camera+ back in 2012 (Bloomberg reported those talks), and would go on to be linked to publisher-tool acquisitions like Mic and to investor Chris Sacca's argument that Twitter was an 'instant fit' for Google itself. Against that arc, Shots reads less like a standalone target than another data point in Twitter's search for growth through mobile social and media assets.
First-order effects
- Twitter's interest, even at the talk stage, immediately raises Shots' visibility and negotiating leverage — a small celebrity-backed app suddenly has a strategic suitor with a public stock currency.
- For Twitter, acquiring Shots would be a direct play for its young, mobile-first selfie audience, complementing rather than replacing Twitter's core text feed.
Second-order effects
- Rival photo and messaging apps — and their investors — get repriced upward as Twitter's due diligence signals that big platforms will pay for engaged teen mobile communities.
- Bieber's involvement becomes a template: celebrity capital shifts from marketing gimmick to a recognized value driver in startup fundraising and exit talks, as later seen when Shots went on to raise $8.5M led by WI Harper (its 2015 round) after these talks apparently didn't produce a sale.
Third-order effects
- The episode foreshadows Twitter's structural problem: repeated exploratory M&A (Camera+, Shots, Mic) instead of organic product wins, feeding the narrative that made Twitter itself perennially discussed as an acquisition target rather than an acquirer.
- If the pattern holds, celebrity-anchored consumer apps become a recognized asset class in social media consolidation — though the fact that Shots ultimately pivoted to a creator-content platform (in 2016) shows how few of these deals actually close or endure.
The trend: This is one early data point in the mid-2010s wave of large social platforms using small mobile-community acquisitions to buy youth engagement they couldn't build organically — a strategy that repeatedly surfaced more ambition than completed deals.