Photobucket isn’t as flashy as YouTube or Flickr, but they have 14 million users, 80 uploaded photos per second and, just two weeks after launching their video product are nearly matching YouTube with 30,000 daily uploaded videos (YouTube is 35,000/day). And, Photobucket is both profitable and cash flow positive.
What is it? It’s the behind the scenes photo and video server for MySpace, eBay and dozens of other sites that either have significant restrictions on photo/video uploads or heavy fees. For users of those services, they often turn to Photobucket to host these files. Photobucket is not designed to be a destination site - their tools are focused on easy uploading, transcoding to flash (in the case of video) and posting to other sites. 63% of all media links to sites like MySpace are served by Photobucket. Compare that to 8% for Flickr and 1.38% for YouTube.
And their tools work so well that they are not forced to compete on price. Photobucket does have a free product, but it’s capped at 1 GB of storage, 10 GB of monthly bandwidth and, for video clips, 3 minutes of total footage per clip (YouTube is 10 minutes). The $25/year premium product has higher limits: 5 GB storage, unmetered bandwidth and video clips of up to 5 minutes.
They’ve just moved into video hosting (the official announcement isn’t until April 25), but after a quiet launch they’ve seen 250,000 video uploads and about 30,000 new uploads per day.
Photobucket was founded in 2003 by CEO Alex Welch. The company is based in Denver and Palo Alto, with 35 total employees. They’ve raised just one round of angel financing on their way to profitability. And VCs in the know are knocking down their door to fund this startup that very few people have ever heard of.
VP Sergio Monsalve gave me a walkthrough of the product today and is pictured in the image above.
I subscribe to Bloglines’ Daily List of the most popular sites out there - presumably calculated on the strength of the links to each site. Photobucket has been #1 every single day.
I don’t actually like PhotoBucket as a service - so many of their images expire quickly (compared to say, imageshack) but I can see and appreciate how they have carved their niche and how they are profitable.
Sorry if I am being a bit of an idiot here… But how exactly do they make money? Just through subscriptions to the pro account?
Alastair,
There are Yahoo! Ads in some pages.
Here is an example : Recent photos.
“And VCs in the know are knocking down their door to fund this startup that very few people have ever heard of.”
Very few people … huh? Almost every MySpace user used Photobucket at one point, and you can click on almost any profile in AIM and find a link to people’s Photobuckets. I can do a short survey of REAL WORLD PEOPLE (not us techno-geeks) and find that most have heard or used Photobucket, while few have heard of YouTube or Flickr.
Robert … it’s one thing to use something called “PhotoBucket” when using MySpace. It’s another thing altogether to understand the business | outsourcing | technological
underpinnings. Something that I’m willing to bet most MySpace users could care less about.
i predict that http://celumimagine.com will rule the game for business users
I think photobucket will start to come under pressure from the likes of click.tv and will be forced to innovate - which is good news for us all.
what the hell? when did photobucket get so popular? its like youtube or myspace, just kinda pops up!
I was about to post the same comment as Robert - among mainstream users, Photobucket is huge. But ask the average college kid what Flickr is, and you’ll get blank faces. I guess these blindspots are another side-effect of the blogosphere’s echo-chamber.
How do they make money? Its the google curves.
http://blog.tallsails.com/2006.....urves.aspx
Saul,
Nah, I doubt they’ll come under pressure from the innovators. Did Bloglines lose to Rojo? Not really. Will Tagworld beat MySpace? Probably not. I think it’s a mistake to think that you can win by having more features - you can’t. You win by being the first and getting the network effect going (often that means having less features).
Phil,
I agree… But the original comment — “startup that very few people have ever heard of.” — is simply wrong. LOTS of people have heard of it…
Lots of companies are now creating widgets to post on myspace, ebay, blogs … its almost become a complete business model for some companies … from http://www.slide.com to http://www.flickr.com to so many more.
It remains to be seen how much profit they can make from ads and getting people to go pro.
It’s a shame their paid account only allows video up to five minutes. I’m sticking with YouTube for the time being, although I am worried about what will happen to my videos if YouTube disappears someday. I contacted them about getting a downloadable version or something on CD and they said they didn’t offer that.
A little more on PhotoBuckets background is in this post on ColoradoStartups.com.
Moayad (and everyone),
Cheers for the answer. However, I see photobuckets main use being putting your photos on other sites. Therefore never really getting traffic to the photobucket site itself. This means that the yahoo ads only reach the small fraction of people who go to the site, not the people who look at the image on ebay etc. But viewing the image on ebay still uses photobuckets bandwidth…
Can the yahoo ads on the main site and pro accounts add up to the total income?
What if photobucket started serving adds on free images hosted with them. I mean so that the ads appear inside the image itself… Is there a loophole for that in the terms of use?
Mike Jones,
Yeah, I’ve been meaning to do a post about “feeding the MySpace beast” for a few weeks now. Finally got around to it today:
http://mashable.com/2006/04/19.....ace-beast/
yet another web based system doing things anyone could have (and has) built for years.
oh dear.. I feel a rant coming on….
the only differenece is the way the virtual community (yes, that’s what we used to call them) and the media they create is able to PROFILE itself. And naturally, the tools that enable that.)
It all down to the ‘createcs’. The people who can design AND code. See the big picture - then let you upload it.
The users, the content, the relations between them, are all things we expect in ANY online ‘community’ (users who signed up) to do. It’s expected.
The only differentiator is the deals available to give someting back to the content producer. And therefore, the value of that content. It’s fiscal.
Sure, the videographed stupidity of the creatures that walk this planet is hilarious for a moment or two, thanks to On2 (not forgetting WildForm) and Macromedia (Adobe) and YouTube and clones, but it seems to me that the BIG media cos. are about to shoehorn ‘their’ content into ‘our’ social media networks , because they are the ones with the hard, cold, CASH. They decide.
Or at least, they think so.
OurMedia still has the best (humane) concept - but the worst tools and most convoluted system - so lets work on solving thise issues rather than all this constant reinventing of the wheel. lets help the benevolent (open) systems.
Give them the cash.
^^^^^^^^^^
Spam alert on the proceeding post. First time I have seen such blatant spamming in the comments section here at Techcrunch.
Photobucket is awesome for people my age (~14 yrs old). Many of my classmates use it to host images on their Xanga/LiveJournals and MySpace pages.
I personally prefer Flickr, but remember — when it comes to young people, the best technology does not always attract the most users. The best features, design, etc. doesn’t either — notice how YouTube isn’t designed all that great and there are many sites that look nicer than MySpace.com, yet these sites are still far more popular than rival sites like TagWorld, for instance.
username.Pin#@uploads.photobucket.com
their “Mobile Upload” feature has come in handy on several occassions when there was a need to distribute a photo ASAP.
Also, ability to post directly to your Blogs was helpful.
Maybe, in the future they might allow uploading of PDF or Tif as “valid file types”
Pete, in some respects I agree, but eventually people catch on and start to move. Look at Yahoo mail.
“80 uploaded photos per second” eh? That’s a lot of photos.
I don’t believe the figures mentioned. Never ever Photobucket has already such figures concerning video. 30.000 videos uploaded/day??? The platform has simply too many restrictions. And is BT not sexy at all.
Show me these 30.000 videos/day!
Maybe some proof or a more distanced view on such PR-colored figures would be appropriate.
I can’t believe the amount of data they are moving. It’s amazing for I didn’t even know that site. O_O
I’ve seen a lot of people using http://www.myphotoalbum.com to link to their webpages that contain photos and videos on MySpace too. One of my friends turned me on the service.
I wanted to compare the services for myself… upload the same video to the different services, then post them all on the same page… judge the quality, see which one makes my videos look better…
Now you can judge for yourself! See the comparison I did online at http://www.myspace.com/vmixtest
Flock browser has support for Photobucket since v. 0.5.13
http://freewaremac.net/2006/flock-web-browser/
VERY GOOD I THINK http://www.opensourcearmenia.com/Members/de/1.html
Myspace has created an oppurtunity for dozens of websites that I love! They all have web 2.0 technology and defy and break the standard which most websites have been built on. My favorite is mytuneslive.com. You can upload mp3 files, and then put a flash player with your customized JPG image on myspace! You can take songs from other users as well and its all LEGAL!
It rocks!