News Corp. Looking At BubbleShare - No Deal Yet
Michael Arrington
29 comments »
Toronto-based photo sharing site BubbleShare, which we’ve followed since its December 2005 launch, has been involved in aquisition talks with News Corp., the parent company to MySpace, according to a source close to the deal. News Corp. would not comment on the rumor.
We’ve held off on reporting this as it our understanding that the deal is not yet finalized, but rumors of the possible acquisition popped up on blogs earlier today.
The deal is rumored to be south of $5 million, which is in line with other recent online acquisitions by News Corp., including NewRoo and Ksolo.
Good for Al and his team!
You’re buying the drinks at the next democamp Al!
I’ll admit, I thought this was another sign of a Web 2.0 bubble when I first read it. News Corp must be buying this for the technology since BubbleShare’s reach has been relatively stable and smallish since their launch according to Alexa (which their founder has admitted is accurate).
$5 Million seems like a lot to pay for technology that News Corp could build themselves for 1/4 the price … but then again, trust a huge multinational to build good software and you rarely end up with something useful. So maybe $5 big ones isn’t so bad after all
Hey, while we’re at it, how about an update on the rest of “The Flickr Gunners”?
Good for them. $5 mil is a lot of money- you can get 125,000 all-nude ($40/dance) lap dances at Spearmit Rhino
Why when techrunch says “less that $5M” do folks take that to mean “$5M”. One deal I know the numbers for that was “less than $25M” was for $10M.
Considering they get >17,500 uniques a day that’s very good. Even if it’s $2M.
Hard to get traction in that space. Even if you have some unique features. Photobucket, imageshack and flickr have got the market wrapped up.
Michael,
This is great news…another photo sharing site - wow - exciting.
Why did you fail to report that HomeAway.com secured $150M today…taking their 6 month total to $200M…yea, $200,000,000.
A web “1.0″ company raised more in 6 months than just about every 2.0 company you reported on, put together.
^ didn’t mean to sound so negative. Sorry.
Has anyone done the maths for break-even for a site like BubbleShare?
Now that hosting and development tools are so cheap, what sort of visitor numbers do you need to make a profit assuming the site’s revenue model is ad-based?
I would think the bottom line is anything they think (x) will be value-add to MySpace, (y) already exists, and (z) can be integrated by a driven team that will stick around for
I just hope that nothing is going to happen to the service, because a unlimited storage of pictures, with fast servers, useful tools and a classy 2.0 interface, and all that for free will not be easy to find out again… I just so love it… please make things right Newsboys!
perfect- bubbleshare is the best photosharing site - ease of use and functionality wise.
newscorp could care less how much traffic they have now - just plug it into myspace and off you go.
“just plug it into myspace and off you go.”
the thing i like is that the way bubbleshare is structured, this would be pretty easy to do.
the way that the hosting, publishing and community aspects of the site are divided up should make it fairly easy to graft bubbleshare onto another social network.
normally i wince when people say ‘just plug it in’ .. but in this case i think that would actually work.
interest in this company is good. the only problem i’ve seen with their model is that though it is perfect for mainstream, non Blogging [capital B] type users is that it isn’t particularly viral .. but a social network to graft onto would solve that very quickly.