PhotoBucket, the company that drives 2% of total U.S. Internet traffic, will announce a $10.5 million Series B round on Tuesday. The round was funded by Trinity Ventures. General Partner Gus Tai will join the PhotoBucket board of directors.
This company is just exploding with growth. PhotoBucket is not a destination site. They’ve capitalized on the photo and video limitations of Myspace and other sites (restrictions on number of photos that may be uploaded, and/or poor tools for doing so) by allowing users to upload photos and videos very easily and display them on these third party sites. And those photos and videos are viewed over 50 billion times per month.
Photobucket is a consumer visual media hosting and publishing service with over 15 million members and 10 million unique monthly visitors, according to Media Metrix. 65,000 new members sign up daily. Members upload personal visual content including videos, images and graphic art and link it to over 50,000 social media, ecommerce, blogging and discussion Web sites like eBay, MySpace, Blogger, and Neopets. Photobucket serves over 50 billion image and video requests per month. Since the launch of its video services in April 2006, Photobucket members have uploaded nearly 1 million video clips at a rate of over 30,000 new videos per day.
The fact that users are uploading videos at nearly the same rate as YouTube (30,000/day at PhotoBucket v. 35,000 at YouTube) is just outstanding - the video product is only a few weeks old. This suggests, strongly, that users want to store their photos and videos in one place.
PhotoBucket offers a free and $25/year premium version with more storage and bandwidth. They are cash flow positive and profitable.
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Oh how I wish the site would change the design back to the previous. The current look and feel is distracting and just feels more difficult to read
So umm … where did this 2% number come from? The same magical place as the FaceBook #?
The 2% number came from the company based on third party data.
Which magical facebook number also came from the company, facebook.
I have to agree with Thomas.
Okay then - what metric constitutes the 2% number? Amount of traffic pushed? And which third party? I just want sources
As for FaceBook - the original %age was stated for the colleges that they represented (which were not 100% at that time). Yet people took it as face value and claimed it to be for all students in the US.
I like Photobucket. I use it regularly. The only thing I hate is the ads. It’s bad enough that they’re so in-your-face, but to have them make stupid sounds and interrupt your music is just pathetic. It’s that one site that’s made me install the AdBlock extension for Firefox.
Otherwise Photobucket is great and a good replacement for people who use ImageShack, but feel they can’t rely on them (they take down high-bandwidth pics.). I haven’t tried the video service yet, but plan to do so soon. If I could have all my uploaded media in one place, all the better.
What I’m still waiting to see is a Tune-Locker style service, where anyone can upload a song one legally own and get an embed code to put it on a site. It would work for podcasts as well.
“This suggests, strongly, that users want to store their photos and videos in one place.”
Well, it just reinforces the fact that people do whatever is easiest. Coming back to our point about Flickr missing out on video: Flickr Video would have been used by the geeks who already frequent the site, but it wouldn’t have been as big as YouTube because Flickr has zero mindshare with the MySpace demographic (the same demographic that made YouTube a success). PhotoBucket can do this because they already have the mindshare of that demo. So while I might concede on the idea that video and photo hosting can work together (this proves it), I still think that Flickr couldn’t have built YouTube (at least not without the acknowledgement that geeksFeeding the MySpace Beast.
That’s weird - the html got mangled. Perhaps it’s because I used the “less than” symbol. The ending should read:
(at least not without the acknowledgement that geeks are a smaller demographic than MySpace users).
See also: Feeding the MySpace Beast”
I just got this email from Sergio Monsalve, a VP at PhotoBucket:
Mike:
Hi! I know you have been getting some questions on how we arrived at the 2% of US internet traffic number so I wanted to completely clarify just in case you’d want to …
According to Telegeography (a research Division of Primetrica, Inc), the US peak traffic is 704 gigabits per second. Photobucket does about 15 gigabits per second peak traffic so we do approximately 2% of US peak traffic. This is from several months ago so given our growth, we might be doing more than that now…I’ll check.
See article on the source…. http://gigaom.com/2005/09/08/u.....dth-daddy/
Or folks can buy the research directly at http://www.telegeography.com/p...../index.php
I hope this helps clarify.
Thanks again for covering this from Spain nonetheless! Enjoy your time there.
S
So now its gone from ‘total internet’ to ‘US internet’? Big Daddy or not, a significant bit of internet traffic is not in the US.
Of course - there is the question of how accurate Telegeography is, but we will take what they said at face value.
AhmedF - My original post said US, this one did not and I fixed that.
I really can’t keep going on this discussion. If you have a bone to pick with the company, just contact them, or write on your own blog, or whatever. If you have a bone to pick with me, your point has been made.
Critical criticism is all it was - I asked a question, you clarified it, and we moved on. I would think that asking questions (especially when big numbers are touted) would be in the best interests of everyone
you started off by saying that I get these numbers from “magical places”. That’s not “constructive criticism”, which is what I assume you mean when you say “critical criticism”.
Okay - that was a bad way of coming across. Nevertheless, I did point out an error, and that was the entire point.
At the same time, I have nothing but respect for PhotoBucket. It is a great example of a company that has been around for a while and has solid growth (and stats) to back them up.
And as for the new design - I like it. Except for the login button, why not just use the default button for that?
Flickr needs to start hosting videos now to play catch-up.
Does anyone really think that flickr and YouTube share similar markets? When I think of flickr I think of high quality amateur to professional photography with constructive feedback and fun, helpful communities. YouTube on the other hand is full of videos of college kids lighting things on fire and people bashing everything and everyone. I don’t think that flickr customers are at all hoping for the addition of videos, it would totally ruin flickr’s user experience.
I used to work for a web hosting company whose network carries Internet traffic through 28 gigabit links to various bandwidth providers. This gives their customers the combined ability to simultaneously transfer up to 28 gigabits (or 3.5 gigabytes) per second of data. Based on the network graphs on their site, their peak usage is ~60% of that amount. Let’s call it 18 gigabits per second.
At one point, a certain customer reconfigured his hosting setup in a hurry because his peak traffic had maxed out on the 1Gbps capacity of his switch. Following Sergio’s logic from above (#9), you would think this guy drove 1/18th of the whole data center’s traffic? But that wasn’t the case. In fact, several other sites with 0.5 - 0.7 Gbps of peak traffic used much more bandwidth on a monthly basis. Their visitors uploaded/downloaded greater amounts of total data - but less of this activity happened simultaneously.
So I’m not sure I agree with PhotoBucket’s methodology for arriving at the 2% figure.
Sorry, Michael, for continuing on this topic. But I think there’s an important distinction between peak traffic - which may or may not be representative of average usage - and total traffic.
YouTube can create a Flickr… But Flickr cannot create a YouTube. In other words, the demographics aren’t “backwards compatable”.
Think about it, it’s essentially what Pete was saying.
Mike, Interesting comment above. Flickr and YouTube should stay where they are, foraying into other spheres is not a good option at this stage especially when they have lots to improve.
Photobucket is decent.
My personal favorite is http://zooomr.com, it offers fantastic features compared to everything and I think Techcrunch called it Flickr on Steroids.
There is a big difference between image hosting and video hosting.
Video hosting is a lot more expensive because it requires a lot of bandwidth.
Image hosting is profitable for some companies, video hosting is a big money sink for all companies.
YouTube burns huge amounts of money every month.
“PhotoBucket Closes $10.5 From Trinity Ventures”
You may want to edit that to say “$10.5M”. I don’t think someone making ten bucks and fifty cents is quite newsworthy
Antonio - good catch. done.
For me the key takeaway it this business point (I have not personally used Photobucket). There are so many new companies whose Web sites try to compete with the attention spans of MySpace, FlickR, insert_other_widely_used_sites_here users, and become destination sites themselves. That’s so hard to do; does anyone feel they can replicate a viral growth model repeatedly and successfully, rather than “accidentally”? Photobucket demonstrates that there is so much opportunity in being a horizontal utility to all these users, thereby being in a position to partner instead of compete with popular Web sites. Now that’s a beach head.
In addition to my own company, I suspect we’ll see a lot of new companies succeed because they provide a value-add to today’s “social browser/user” AND the social networks.
JOrdan Mitchell, well said.
isabel — I agree with your point. By PhotoBucket’s logic, if my website, for even 5 minutes per day, pushed peak traffic at 100Gbit/sec, could I claim to account for 14% of all Internet traffic? Really, it’s a nice fudge but far from anything useful as far as stats go.
Would someone let me log on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I tend to just use http://www.imagemirror.com.. its not crowded yet and is fast.. and as far as i can tell is completley free and unrestricted
what is a site like photobucket?
Not as loud or sexy as Flickr, but profitable.
It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.