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MySpace snaps Photobucket
• Marriage made in heaven or shotgun wedding?
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By
The Minx, Entertainment Editor
Wednesday,
9 May, 2007
Only a few weeks ago they weren't on speaking terms but now they have announced their engagement and a wedding is on the cards.
It claims it is the biggest Photosite in the world, with 41 million registered users and is growing by 80,000 members a day. But chances are until a couple of weeks ago you had never heard of it. Now it seems, MySpace has snapped it up for $250 million in cash.
In early April, MySpace blocked traffic from the photosharing web site Photobucket preventing user generated slideshows and videos from being embedded on its site. MySpace claimed it was simply enforcing its terms for third-party widgets.
Photobucket hit back claiming MySpace was infringing on the free speech of its members and stifling the community. The photo site said it was never approached by MySpace to resolve the issue before the plug was pulled.
At the time Mike Arrington at TechCrunch speculated that it might be News Corp rattling its sabre because Photobucket was looking for a buyer. Were the photo and video sharing service to fall into the hands of one of MySpace's main competitors — say Google or another big media company — for Murdoch et al. it would be like YouTube all over again.
In late April the pair kissed and made up. Now in early May comes the news that MySpace has snapped up the fast growing photo sharing website Photobucket for $250 million.
Photobucket says it has 41 million registered users and grows by 80,000 members a day but the price includes a $50m payback.
According to internet traffic rankings service Hitwise, Photobucket accounted for 73% of MySpace's photo-related traffic in March, and Photobucket received 57% of its traffic from MySpace.
Photobucket, founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, took off in 2005 as users on social network sites such as Myspace began to use the service to store and display pictures of themselves and their friends.
Its success had been both a blessing and a curse. The popularity of Photobucket's free service among users of the News Corporation social network took the service to 17m unique visitors per month, according to Comscore, making it the web's most popular photo site, ahead of rivals such as Yahoo's.
And although the site has more or less always been at or near profitability -the venture's rising bandwidth costs ate up most of its revenue growth, and management's claims -- that users' loyalty was to the site that hosted their photos, not the site on which they were displayed -- were always a stretch.
Photobucket, had been rumoured to be seeking a buyer since March, when they hired investment bank Lehman Brothers Inc. According to internet traffic rankings service Hitwise, Photobucket accounted for 73% of MySpace's photo-related traffic in March, and Photobucket received 57% of its traffic from MySpace.
The Minx
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