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April 24, 2007

PhotoBucket Back on MySpace (I Want To Know The Backstory)

Michael Arrington

28 comments »

A simple blog post on Photobucket tells us that the war is over - PhotoBucket videos are now allowed on MySpace again after a two week ban.

But the interesting part of this story is what I don’t know yet - who blinked first and why. I’ve asked Photobucket if they made any concessions to MySpace and got back a long but essentially content-free reply that boiled down to “we get along very well with MySpace.”

I anxiously await Photobucket’s April Comscore numbers to see how traffic to the site was affected. Early indications from Alexa suggest traffic actually trended up over the last couple of weeks, although the massive press the story received could have had an impact. Comscore numbers will be much more reliable. Regardless of traffic, Photobucket was probably anxious to put this behind them and avoid spooking any potential acquirors looking at the company.

MySpace may have their reasons for ending this, too. They certainly showed that they were willing to execute a larger partner, and widget companies will think thrice before trying to slip any ads into their products down the road (and for the record, its far from clear that Photobucket was doing this). MySpace made their point quite clearly. However, the negative press surrounding the incident was perhaps more than they anticipated. With their point made, allowing Photobucket back in had little downside.

Been hanging around any tipsy MySpace or Photobucket execs lately and hear something good? Let me know.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 2:56 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. www.techtagg.com - See Tech Taggers view on this story!

    April 24th, 2007 at 7:10 am

  2. Startup Meme » MySpace Lifts The Ban On Photobucket Videos

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  3. Profy.Com

    April 24th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

  4. Confirmed: MySpace To Acquire Photobucket For $250 Million

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  5. Publictivity.com Blog » Now That’s Negotiating- Myspace/News Corp Buying Photobucket

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  8. » MySpace and Photobucket are friends again | The Social Web | ZDNet.com

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Comments

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  1. robert

    April 24th, 2007 at 3:26 am

    definetly wanna know what Tom and his pals over at myspace were thinking too!

    they tried the same stuff with youtube back when youtube started a couple years back so it’ll make up for good watercooler/im conversation as to why this went down the way it did.

  2. Mike @ Emerging Earth

    April 24th, 2007 at 6:05 am

    Given MySpace’s greedy walled nature, this probably involved Photobucket paying millions.

  3. pallet jack

    April 24th, 2007 at 6:42 am

    - yeah we will never know -

    - honestly I hoped Photo Bucket found a argument we could all use later on

  4. Kreig Zimmerman

    April 24th, 2007 at 6:50 am

    It’s probably bloody obvious to many, but MySpace is going about this the wrong way. They could easily have an “official partnership” program, with ad revenue sharing… let’s say, a “Reverse-AdSense”.

    My guess, of course, is that this is being driven from Fox Corporate, who want to keep all the marbles to themselves (and make the acquisition pay for itself). It’ll be interesting to see what happens but they are presently creating a vast chasm between what MySpace could be and what they want out of it.

    Fox better hope no other company slips into that gap. Of course they can have confidence in exploiting MySpace’s dominant position, but that could always change…

  5. Greg

    April 24th, 2007 at 6:52 am

    This really makes MySpace seem like a bunch of jerks, especially because they’ve done it repeatedly. Every time they remind widget makers of the MySpace Sword of Damocles by pulling this move, they look worse.

  6. Chris

    April 24th, 2007 at 7:13 am

    This strategy of MySpace will not endear any of its users. It is better for other companies not to rely on MySpace, they should work with other networking companies, who will respond better to their needs.

  7. Alexander Muse

    April 24th, 2007 at 7:16 am

    Why does this make MySpace seem like jerks? If MySpace had built their business on justice, democracy and altruism I could see how one could characterize their actions as ‘jerky’. The opposite has been true from the start. The MySpace folks are not in it to create a community for the benefit of mankind, instead they are in it for a buck. What is wrong with that? There is room for MySpace as well as quasi-democratic services such as Wikipedia. Chill out Greg…

  8. Steve Morsa

    April 24th, 2007 at 7:21 am

    Regardless of details of how/why it happened; and it’s nice to see PhotoB regain access; because it’s News Corp/MySpace’s house, they’re soley entitled to set the rules for anyone who wants to come in.

    Anyone who doesn’t like their rules can always go build their own house.

  9. KR

    April 24th, 2007 at 7:46 am

    reminiscent of the paypal/ebay dustups chronicled in the “PayPal Wars” by Eric Johnson. ebay tried to use heavy handed tactics to disrupt PayPal’s popularity and promote its own BillPoint service. that one ended with eBay discontinuing its BillPoint service and buying PayPal for around $1.5 billion.

    in the end, these “bans” are not good for the site with the traffic (myspace), since the community is the one that gets negatively impacted. the value-add provider (photobucket) gains if the users complain enough. if the myspace users do not complain, then the value-add service is not valuable enough to raise a fuss. at that point, the value-add providers position is severely weakened. myspace underestimated the popularity and importance of photobucket, and have lost their hammer against them. myspace is supposed to care about its user community right?

  10. David

    April 24th, 2007 at 8:47 am

    Interesting development last night on myspace it appears that they have changed the process that users can upload HTML code. There have been a few companies that have figured out how to automatically send a widget or picture to someones profile page by screen scraping. Apparently MySpace has figured this out and now every time you update your profile page you are prompted with a scramble code that you have to enter.

  11. Greg

    April 24th, 2007 at 10:18 am

    @ Alexander Muse: I never said they were some paragon of human virtue, and I get that MySpace is a business, not a non-profit with my best interests at heart. I’m not sure where you got that idea.

    My point is that arbitrarily blocking widgets just because they can, until the creators pay up or the outrage reaches critical mass, is a jerk thing to do. It’s inconveniencing their users and making the site look bad.

    It’s a bit like Viacom pulling all their clips from YouTube: what they did was well within their rights as a business, but certainly not something I’d recommend doing, and considering the PR backlash, it might be counterproductive in the long run.

  12. CrunchBack

    April 24th, 2007 at 11:51 am

    I’m with Alexander on this one - and as I previously wrote, MySpace can certainly expect to get paid for ads that appear on its properties when embedded in a widget.

    Perhaps PhotoBucket is the “jerk” here for trying to profit from the ride that MySpace was giving them without sharing the wealth…

    Think about it…

  13. sean percival

    April 24th, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    They are also starting to filter HTML post data even further now. By rewriting links to a redirect off their own server they now have better control over what gets through. More details here:

    http://socialham.com/2007/04/2.....ing-links/

  14. Bill K

    April 24th, 2007 at 5:01 pm

    I keep telling my friends in bands not to put all their web eggs in the myspace basket for this exact reason.

  15. Greg

    April 24th, 2007 at 7:21 pm

    Crunchback: I’m not arguing that. They’re perfectly within their rights to do what they did. I just think there are better ways to approach the situation than locking out services, services that MySpace users obviously enjoy, without warning or discussion.

    There are better ways to get their piece of the ad pie than bringing the hammer swiftly down, is all I’m saying.

  16. Andrew Chen

    April 25th, 2007 at 8:34 am

    Hi guys,
    Here’s an analysis on what might become a stable situation in the widget world, where widgets are the new ad network:

    http://andrewchen.typepad.com/....._netw.html

  17. jared

    April 25th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

    sounds like this was in response to some sort of vulnerability. when one of the channels on your cable goes out, do you automatically assume that the local cable provider has decided to block CSPAN or ESPN? sheesh.

  18. David Mackey

    April 26th, 2007 at 8:17 pm

    MySpace still lags behind technologically. I hope they will acquire a company like Xanga and move forward.

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