Lots more details are coming in on the Photobucket fire sale by MySpace/News Corp. The sale is all but complete, say new sources. And the buyer is definitely Washington state based Ontela.
Ontela, a mobile photo upload and storage service, is backed by Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, among others.
Steamboat Ventures is said to be putting $40 million or more in additional capital into Ontela. Most of that will go to News Corp., valuing Photobucket at $60 million, say multiple sources. A portion of the new funding will go into the merged entity.
MySpace acquired Photobucket back in 2007 for $250 million, plus a $50 million earnout. This new deal marks that valuation down by almost 83%.
News Corp., via MySpace, acquired photo/video sharing site Photobucket back in 2007 for $250 million, plus a $50 million earnout. We’ve now learned through a source with knowledge of the deal that MySpace is in the process of selling at least a majority interest in Photobucket. The likely buyer? Disney-backed Ontela, a Washington state startup.
Photobucket has grown steadily since the acquisition, and currently brings in 54 million worldwide users each month (Comscore). But MySpace never integrated with Photobucket, keeping their own separate photo and video platforms.
It’s been little more than a side show ever since the acquisition, and the founders have left to do other projects. With News Corp. scrambling to fix up its digital division, it’s no wonder Photobucket has been on the chopping block.
Best of all, the deal will bring in new cash to News Corp.
It’s not clear that the final terms have been worked out. But our source tells us that News Corp. will sell a majority stake in Photobucket, retaining some equity. If Ontela is the buyer, the merged company will take a new round of financing, with most of the cash going to News Corp., and part of it going into the new company.
Presumably this deal won’t look much different from eBay’s spinoff of StumbleUpon earlier this year, except on a larger scale. News Corp. gets a cash injection and retains a portion of Photobucket. And the service, combined with Ontela or another buyer, gets a new start.
The founders of photo sharing site Photobucket, Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, are leaving News Corp./Fox, we’ve confirmed. The two sold Photobucket to Fox Interactive in May 2007 for around $300 million. Welch and Crystal will leave the company at the end of August.
Photobucket attracted 53 million worldwide visitors in June (Comscore worldwide) and remains one of the most popular photo hosting sites on the Internet. The site first launched six years ago.
The two aren’t commenting on the timing of their exit or what they plan to do next. The earnout on the acquisition ended in May 2009, and it isn’t unusual for founders to leave once the acquisition has been fully paid out. Given their history, I’m sure they’ll be starting something new shortly.
Shutterfly, an online photo sharing and printing site, is adding video capability to its photo sharing sites. Shutterfly is using video hosting site Motionbox to power its video sharing service. So when you upload a video to your Shutterfly Share site, it will also be stored in your Motionbox account. If you upload to Motionbox directly, you will be given the option to post your video to your Shutterfly Share site.
Users can also share videos to social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Blogger can upgrade for unlimited video storage and HD-quality playback. The free accounts are a little limiting for storage—you can only upload ten video clips. For $30 per year, you can have a premium subscription which allows higher file size limits, unlimited video downloads and HD-quality playback.
PhotoBucket, the FIM-owned photo sharing goliath that sees over 25 million monthly uniques, is taking aim at becoming the dominant photo sharing service on Twitter. The company has quietly launched TwitGoo, a media-sharing service designed from the ground up to be Twitter-friendly, allowing users to share photos with only a few clicks (and movies are on the way).
PhotoBucket used to be one of the small guys, coming from nowhere in 2006 to emerge as one of the Internet’s largest photo providers. Much of its initial growth was driven by its ability to thrive on a popular social site – in this case it was MySpace, which previously didn’t have many easy options for embedding photos. Now the tables have turned, as TwitPic has come from a similarly unknown position to become the leader in sharing photos on Twitter. Traffic may still be relatively modest compared to more orthodox photo sharing sites, but with Twitter poised to become a mainstream phenomenon, media sharing is going to take off fast. PhotoBucket competitor Imageshack launched its own service in February. And now PhotoBucket wants a pi
Photo-sharing on the Web keeps getting more popular as people transfer more of their digital photos from their the black holes of their computer hard drives to social networks where their friends and family can actually see them. Although Facebook Photos has emerged as the largest photo-sharing service in terms of users and is one of the fastest-growing of any size, it is still not the largest by the sheer number of images that it stores.
That honor, for the moment, goes to ImageShack, which currently hosts 20 billion images, I’ve confirmed with the company (for more background on ImageShack, read this post). Facebook holds 15 billion photos, according to a spokesperson there. But it should catch up by the end of the year. Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 850 million photos a month, compared to 100 million photos a month by ImageShack users. Good thing Facebook just fixed its storage architecture to be able to handle the bigger load.
If Facebook has one standout application it has to be Photos. Measured on its own, it is the largest photo site on the Web. A full 69 percent of Facebook’s monthly visitors worldwide either look at or upload photos, based on comScore data. And more than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to the site.
And it’s been pulling away from its competitors. As can be seen in the comScore chart above, as recently as last September the top three photo sites in the U.S. were running neck-and-neck, with Facebook Photos at 23.9 million unique visitors, followed by Photobucket at 21.3 million uniques, and Flickr at 19.5 million uniques. But by January, the number of monthly U.S. visitors going to Facebook Photos shot up 41 percent to 33.6 million. Meanwhile, Photobucket is up only 7 percent to 22.8 million, while Flickr is up 12 percent to 21.9 million. (Picasa is a distant fourth in the U.S. with 8.1 million).
In other words, Facebook increased the gap between its closest competitor (Photobucket in the U.S.) from 2.6 million monthly unique visitors to 10.8 million. On a worldwide basis, the gap between Facebook Photos and Flickr (which is the No. 2 site globally, and looks like it is about to pass Photobucket in the U.S.) went from 41.2 million unique monthly visitors in September to 87 million in December (the most recent data available, see chart below).
What accounts for Facebook’s advantage in the photo department?
Fox Interactive Media is eliminating more than just free lunches. News Corp’s digital arm is trimming nearly 100 jobs across several business units, including Photobucket, MySpace, Scout Media, Rotten Tomatoes, and corporate. The total comes to a little under 5 percent of FIM’s domestic U.S. workforce, and about 3 percent of its global workforce of 2,900. We have added the amount to our Layoff Tracker.
Although MySpace employs 1,600 of those workers, a check with sources close to FIM suggests that the vast majority of job cuts (80 to 90 percent) are happening elsewhere. One of the hardest hit business units is Photobucket, where 22 people are losing their jobs. The corporate offices are also absorbing a substantial portion of the layoffs.
On the heels of a major upgrade earlier this week that added facial recognition and video-editing features to its Picasa photo management service, Google added a new Explore page today that shows off the most popular public photos uploaded by members. In addition to the featured photos, shown in a 3 X 4 grid, the Explore page also shows the most recent photos uploaded in a slide-show widget. Below, it offers a list of the most popular tags. For instance, here are pictures tagged “New York.”
The Picasa Explore page also has a Where In The World? game that is mashup opf geotagged photos and Google Maps. It shows you a photo and you have to guess where it was taken. If you guess wrong, it tells you how far off you are in kilometers. This is fun for outdoor photos, but when people upload geotagged photos of a generic apartment of a plate of food, it can become tricky.
Photobucket, one of the web’s most visited sites and home to billions of photos, is introducing a new feature dubbed “Group Albums”. The feature will allow multiple friends to add their photos and videos to a shared album, which can be password protected and moderated by the Group’s owner. Group Albums aren’t currently active on the site – Photobucket expects to have them live by Wednesday morning.
Group Albums will support sharing via emailed invitations and RSS feeds, and will allow an album’s contents to be presented in a slideshow. Each album will have a maximum size of 1GB.
The feature will be handy for many Photobucket users, but it’s hardly novel. Similar features have been on social networking sites like Facebook for years.
Photobucket, acquired by Fox Interactive Media in May 2007 for $300 million, is releasing their API to the public today and will allow third party developers to build photo/video storage and visualization to their applications. Adobe, AOL, FotoFlexer, Intercasting, RockYou, Slide and Snapvine are being announced as launch partners. API documentation is available at developer.photobucket.com.
Previously the API was released only to signed business development partners, and had limited functionality. Functionality includes log in via OAuth, album creation and editing, content uploading, content sharing via email, search and metadata access (tags, titles, descriptions, etc.).
Photobucket is also promoting third party services on their API, at gallery.photobucket.com.
Flickr has had an API available since late 2005, with hundreds of third party applications built on the base service.
Starting tomorrow Photobucket will be able to edit images on the service in-browser courtesy of technology provided by FotoFlexer.
The deal, which is highly reminiscent of the one recently struck between Flickr and Picnik, allows for things like resizing, rotating, coloring, decorating, beautifying, and distorting.
Peter Pham, VP of Business Development over at Photobucket(acquired by FIM last May) has resigned to head up a new company, BillShrink, as CEO.
BillShrink, which has been in development for the past seven months and largely under the radar, will launch in a couple of weeks with the aim of helping users save money. Its strategy lies in suggesting better service packages for select verticals, starting with cellular phone plans.
Consumers will answer a set of cell phone service-related questions and optionally submit their wireless account username and password. The service will then extract your usage habits, assess your answers, and suggest an optimal set of wireless package configurations from the wide range of plans and add-ons that providers offer. This Orbitz-like result set can be tweaked by changing your preferences, for example, in favor of more coverage over lower prices.
Much of BillShrink’s power will come from its web scraping and normalization engine that will gather and make sense of the deals provided by the various cellular providers. The company aims to improve on suggestion services like LowerMyBills by moving beyond comparison grids and making clear suggestions that have been generated by the analysis of many factors.
BillShrink will eventually move into other verticals, such as credit cards and insurance plans, with the end goal of becoming a destination that consumers can trust and return to frequently for spending advice. The company will primarily generate revenue from lead generation, similarly to Mint.
Schwark Satyavolu and Samir Kothari co-founded BillShrink, which has taken funding from Bessemer Venture Partners.
Photobucket has announced inline support for inclusion of Photobucket photos within MySpace. To use, MySpace users click on “Add Image From Photobucket” when leaving a comment, which then provides them the ability to browse their Photobucket photos. Users can also search Photobucket for images other than their own for inclusion in a comment.
The only downside is that MySpace has yet to provide log in integration with Photobucket, and hence MySpace users will not only require a separate Photobucket account, they’ll also have to log in to Photobucket from within MySpace to use the feature.
The addition of Photobucket support in MySpace has certainly not been quick in coming (MySpace acquired Photobucket in May for $300 million) but it is a step in the right direction. Photobucket has continued to grow since being acquired by MySpace, and has recently passed the 56 million member mark, up from 36 million in March.
Picture and file hosting has established credentials as a business idea. As the cost of storage has rapidly decreased as social networking has boomed picture hosting has been a hot vertical. There’s no shortage of sites in this space, and easy money to be had. At the very top Photobucket was acquired by MySpace for $250 million. To date free file hosting sites have been just that: free file hosting where essentially you get a service for free and the operators keep the profits from the site. Shareapic wants to change that.
Shareapic’s model is simple. It offers the same basic service other free hosting sites offer; upload your pic, get an embed code then display the pic on your site of choice. But Shareapic believes that their success in hosting files and profiting from this should be rewarded. Every registered Shareapic user gets a cut of any advertising revenues Shareapic makes. Primarily this isn’t based on advertising revenue made against each image (although users can add their Adsense code for some revenue via Google), payments are calculated based on image views. Their example:
If in month one Shareapic calculates to distribute $1,000 to our members, we will first tally up the total number of image views for that month. Using these two numbers we can determine the respective payouts for each user. If there were a total of 500,000 image views for the month, image views will equate to $0.002 each (1,000 divided by 500,000), or $2 per 1000 image views. If you’re posting lots of pics in forums, MySpace or eBay, you can see how easy it is to earn quite a bit of money!
Perhaps the only draw back is that Shareapic doesn’t disclose the revenue share; it may lack transparency but it’s still more than other sites pay in this space, which is zero.
We’ve covered two other companies that paid members to participate today, AGLOCO which went to the deadpool, and Capazoo, both of which had dubious multi-level marketing schemes (some would suggest pyramid schemes) and usually come with a catch. By comparison Shareapic has an honest model, so honest in fact that it should be the way of the future. What Shareapic does is recognize that users of a free service provide a financial benefit to the provider, and that in return profits provided by user participation should be shared (at least in part) back. Imagine the hours and hours put in by Facebook users or users of other sites; they may be free services but the providers benefit from each participant, and in the case of Facebook’s valuation, greatly. Expect to see more sites like Shareapic who value their users to the point that they offer financial rewards in return; it’s not only a smart marketing pitch it’s also fair recognition of your time and your effort in a market where many have business models that expect a free ride from their users. Build it and they will come may well be replaced with reward them for their time by sharing profits, and we’ll all be the winners from that.
San Francisco based social network widget provider Slide has hit new highs, with reports that they are now serving over one million new widgets daily.
Slide provides widget based photo slideshows that users can embed in a range of social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Friendster.
Slide has impeccable backing, being founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and funded by Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund with a rumored round of $20million in November 2006.
Slide’s Facebook apps alone have a combined usage number in excess of 10 million users. comScore reports that Slide was serving 117 million unique visitors a month as of April 2007.
Slide competes directly with services including RockYou, Flektor, and Photobucket.
We’ve gotten word that Fox has closed the acquisition of Photobucket, has wired the money to the Photobucket shareholders and will issue a press release tomorrow.
Photobucket has announced the launch of Photobucket Media Plug-in 2.0, an enhanced version of its free image and video hosting plug-in.
The new plug-in gives users of participating web sites the ability to search for billions of publicly stored photos, videos and images from Photobucket’s extensive library, along with access to their own content from existing Photobucket media accounts, all without leaving partner sites.
Photobucket Media Plug-in 2.0 partner sites include: Freewebs, Gaiaonline.com, LiveJournal, Piczo, Rockyou.com, Singshot, Slide.com and Tagged.com.
Photobucket CEO Alex Welch said that by adding search to Photobuckets Media Plug-ins will deliver a more compelling service option for Photobucket’s partners.
25 million searches are conducted daily across Photobucket’s public library of photos, images and videos. The Photobucket service is a top 50 site online according to Alexa; their acquisition by Fox Interactive May 7 seems to have done no harm to the wildly popular service and the launch of this new service would seem to indicate that the company continues to thrive under their new owner.
The Photobucket and Flektor acquisitions were confirmed by Fox Interactive today in a press release. No details on prices, so we are assuming earlier reports were correct: $300 million for Photobucket (including a $50 million earnout) and $15-20 million for Flektor.
We had earlier reported that MySpace made both of these acquisitions; in fact parent company Fox Interactive was the buyer.
See Photobucket and Flektor at the Techcrunch Database.
NewsCorp plans to pay half as much for Photobucket as they did for MySpace. Photobucket is going for $300 million with the earnout (a steal compared to Google/YouTube), and MySpace was acquired for $580 million, back in 2005.
Two separate analytics services, though, show that the Photobucket deal will bring very few new customers to MySpace because of the nearly 100% overlap in users.
Nielsen/Netratings says MySpace has 55.9 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Photobucket’s 14.7 million. Combined though, the sites will have just 57.7 million unique visitors. That means just just 1.8 million of Photobucket’s visitors don’t currently visit MySpace, too. That’s a 3% gain for MySpace. If you count just new users, MySpace is paying $167 for each one of them.
Comscore tells a similar story, showing that 77% of Photobucket’s users are also visiting MySpace regularly.
As a point of comparison, the overlap between Google and YouTube was even greater according to Comscore. At the time of the acquisition in October 2006, 80% of YouTube’s users also visited Google regularly.
MySpace already offers its users the same basic services as Photobucket (photo and video sharing). If they aren’t buying Photobucket for the product and they aren’t getting any new users…then why are they buying them? To limit the availability of Photobucket features and all that user content to other fast-growing social networks without these features? Because they can? Let’s see what MySpace has to say about this as the deal closes.
