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%.
MySpace won’t answer queries about this story (in fact, they seem to have cut us off completely after this slightly critical story last week). Ontela keeps sending us to voicemail.
This is not good for ImageShack….
Who cares?
lmao who gives a shit
Nope, exactly. ImageShack and its yFrog service are smaller than Photobucket, which was overvalued two years ago anyway. I would estimate ImageShack may be worth as little as $25 million – if they’re lucky.
Cheers,
Doug
What I think is really great – they use your job board service to advertise for their open positions! Super all around WIN – say what you want about them, leave your opinion, let them pretend to be “mad” at you, and still collect money since they are begging for devs.
Nice and to the point; ouch on the -83% valuation.
Does this indicate anything about image hosting services in general; are they becoming somewhat of a commodity?
Mike, Valuation is still down compare to early 2008, right? Is this the reason why many are only raising small seed rounds? TechCrunch reported today that Sequoia was involved in a $1 million round for DailyBooth, what about their transaction cost?
What a terrible price. Tough sector to be in.
Anyone know their revenues and profitability?
“they seem to have cut us off completely”
Classic Arrington.
OFFTOPIC:
I see that Google Ad Manager has replaced OpenX in the sponsored ads on techcrunch. Very interesting. Mike, any comments?
great deal for Ontela.
I’m really surprised by this. I had spoken with Ontela a few years ago and at least at the time, they didn’t seem to have that much of a highly differentiated solution.
Ontela was pretty small and still seems pretty small. Now Steamboat Ventures is said to be putting $40 million or more in additional capital into Ontela? Just seems odd…
ImageShack is doing quite well considering how small the company is.
If I know my friends that recently joined the myspace team those visit and page view numbers mentioned in the “slightly critical story” will be much improved upon in the very short term.
So what really happened? did the sale happen to Ontela?