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:Buying their way in?

[Ngarrang]

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."

Re:Buying their way in?

[neoform]

What do you mean? Hotmail is totally as good if not better than when they were bought out.. ..

Ahahahahahahaha, man I needed a good laugh this morning..

Re:Buying their way in?

[Ngarrang]

"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.

Goodbye, Photobucket

[daeg]

Goodbye, Photobucket. We had some good times, shared some good pictures, but we're moving in two separate directions. You, to a mega corporation with draconian views on privacy in pursuit of only the next dollar, and me, to hell in a handbasket for the photos we shared. You can keep the ring. It's not real, it's just some piece of glass I found on the sidewalk.

Re:Goodbye, Photobucket

[Joebert]

You can keep the ring. It's not real, it's just some piece of glass I found on the sidewalk.

They know, someone uploaded a photo of you picking it up.

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".

The Pokey Mon Effect

[postbigbang]

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?

News Corp

[Anonymous Coward]

Just when they thought it couldn't be done, someone finally has a monopoly on stupid.

Strange coincidences?

[sethstorm]

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?

Forgetfullness

[Joebert]

has signed up 41 million registered users, up from 32 million at the end of last year

Ok, that's a little hard to believe, there's no way 9 million people forgot their passwords last year.

Re:Forgetfullness

[HalifaxRage]

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.

Screw Newscorp.

[k1e0x]

I'm not very happy with Myspace's parent company right now and their decision to censor and remove all Ron Paul bulletins.

See the link .. http://digg.com/politics/Video_MySpace_Censoring_R on_Paul_Supporters

I think them buying anything is bad.. and really wish they didn't buy Myspace.

Re:Screw Newscorp.

[Rachel Lucid]

She's had a few endorsement deals that you'd know about if you stepped inside a mall within the past five years, including a relatively recent one with MAC makeup. (the joys of being geeky AND female, eh?)

So to answer your question, no, she doesn't make that big of an impression; just enough to keep the name relatively fresh.

She makes more of one than your presidential candidate does though.

Re:Sure Evidence....

[shotgunefx]

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.