Slashdot Mirror
News Corp to Purchase Photobucket
DJCacophony writes "Reuters is reporting that Newscorp, having already purchased Myspace, is purchasing the image hosting site Photobucket for between 250 and 300 million dollars. The story details how Photobucket and Myspace, which have previously had disputes over advertising on each others' sites, will now be integrated with each other. The deal is still very much on the table, apparently, and may yet fall through. 'While hardly known outside the youthful world of social network sites, Photobucket has become wildly popular with users for providing free, online storage tools for multimedia self-expression, from photos to videos to digital slideshows. Site builders turn to it for images to decorate their sites. The four-year-old startup, based in Palo Alto, California, has signed up 41 million registered users, up from 32 million at the end of last year and 2 million in 2004. It now hosts nearly 2.8 billion images on the site.'"
In three years, your MySpace and PhotoBucket and Flicr and FaceBook accounts will be like PokeyMon cards.
Kinka-chu!
Just a prediction, but I've yet to see Murdoch turn his purchases into anything but short-term banalities.
Mod me troll, but it's like Yahoo! buying Broadcast.com (Mark Cuban's org). $2B was spent-- in cash-- and does anyone buy mp3s from Yahoo?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Given Fox's history of practicing and favoring "private entity censorship", is it quite strange of a coincidence for another article to be close to this one?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Yes, buying in. Companies have been doing it for ages. Sometimes, it is cheaper to buy than build your own. It seems like this activity is expected in day and age of dot-coms. Investors are looking for these big buy-outs. Why did Google go public? Because their initial investors were pushing for it. Google was doing just fine as a private company. MySQL is going public for the same reason.
And beyond going public, getting bought is a huge pay day for those stock holders (or just the initial investors if the company is still private).
I feel sorry the employees at these companies, though. After this purchase, Photobucket may "reorganize to make its operation more efficient."
Bearded Dragon
You forgot the people who create throwaway accounts because they either (a) only used the site once, then used it again months later, or (b) signed up ages ago and forgot, then signed up again.
bomb the us up set someone
"I understand this premise for something like myspace, or youtube, but surely myspace could have just started offering an easy interfact to upload pictures, and they would have taken over from photobucket? Or is photobucket used in so many other places? (I see imageshack everywhere, not photobucket)"
Think about your own use of internet services. When Google bought blogger.com, if you were a google user, did you switch? Over a billion images are hosted on PhotoBucket. Okay, so MySpace kludges in a picture feature, too. But, PhotoBucket still has those billions of images. Are users going to go through the effort of moving those pictures? Even if MySpace made it one-click? Probably not. That would mean having to re-edit links on pages, e-mail your friends of the change. Blah, blah blah. I think you see where I am going with this. MySpace could certainly try and grow their own photo storage, but this deal gives Newscorp billions of images NOW.
Users tend to stick with what worked for them yesterday. Switching is a pain.
Bearded Dragon
But isn't photobucket basically just a dump for image files to be posted elsewhere? Myspace sucks a good deal of the time, but the fact the people are there and so are there friends provides a certain sticky-ness that keeps them there. I can't imagine why a user would care whether they get their free image hosting at photo-bucket, image-shack, whatever.
For a small fraction of that price, they could have just made a much better service and taken the users that way.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.