Snapchat reportedly turned down a $3 billion (or more) acquisition by Facebook. The private messaging company must really think it’s on to something special.

Facebook must think so too. That’s three times what it paid for Instagram.

This piece of news comes from the Wall Street Journal, citing people briefed on the matter, who also say that other companies are courting it as well, and that it will not likely entertain any acquisition or investment offer until early next year.

The Journal recently reported on a $1 billion acquisition offer from Facebook.

This comes at a time when Facebook is losing teen interest, and even acknowledging that fact.

On its recent earnings call, Facebook CFO David Ebersman said, “I want to say a few words about youth engagement on Facebook. As we’ve said previously, this is a hard issue for us to measure because self-reported age data is unreliable for younger users, so we’ve developed other analytical methods to help us estimate usage by age. Our best analysis of youth engagement in the U.S. reveals that usage of Facebook among U.S. teens overall was stable from Q2 to Q3, but we did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens.”

He added, “We won’t typically call out such granular data, especially when it’s of questionable statistical significance, given the lack of precision of age estimates for younger users, but we wanted to share this with you now since we get a lot of questions about teens. We’re pleased that we remain close to fully penetrated on teens in the U.S. Our monthly user numbers remain steady, and overall engagement on Facebook remains strong. We’ll continue to focus our development efforts to build products that drive engagement for people of all ages.”

A recent study also found that more teens prefer Twitter than do Facebook as their social network of choice, and a lot of them are also using Snapchat. With Twitter consisting mostly of public content, and Snapchat of private, that leaves Facebook somewhere in between, trying to be everything to everyone.

Image: Snapchat (Google Play)