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.'"

Comments

Buying their way in?

[HalifaxRage]

The funny thing about big corporations buying up successful websites, they never seem to be "as good" as before, and they just drive entrepreneurs to create the next "fad". Soon we'll be left with billion-dollar websites that don;t *do* anything.

Re:Goodbye, Photobucket

[Sosetta]

Photobucket already 'censors' content. Anything not okay for prime time TV gets deleted.

This isn't a bad thing. It's what keeps photobucket from being a free porn hosting site. It also helps to catch people who do things that ought not be done (think of the children). The bar for what's okay and what's not okay might move with News Corp, but make no mistake, there's been a bar for a while.

My significant other does content moderation for them.

Re:Goodbye, Photobucket

[DJCacophony]

You should be able to, but unfortunately that is not the case. If you start removing pornographic images from your image-hosting site, you then assume responsibility for continuing to do so. Any defense that says "I can't be bothered to do it all the time" will be overruled by the argument "but you did it here, here, and here, so you know it's wrong and you frequently act upon it".