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.