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. CrunchBase Information Photobucket FotoFlexer Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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. CrunchBase Information BillShrink Photobucket Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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. → Read More
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) → Read More
Your TiVo box added a wee bit o’ usefulness today with the inclusion of Photobucket and Picasa compatibility. You can view your own photos, other people’s photos that you’ve been given the ability to access, and you can also customize photo feeds and view photos that have been tagged with specific keywords. Anyone try this out yet? I’m gonna fire my TiVo up this afternoon and give it a whirl. TiVo gains Photobucket, Picasa photo streaming [Electronista] → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
By almost any measure, MySpace got Photobucket for an absolute steal when compared to the Google YouTube deal. The companies are somewhat comparable – both have very large libraries of user-created videos, and both built their business on the back of MySpace. Photobucket also has a huge library of shared photos, a business YouTube never entered. Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for YouTube. By the time the deal closed, the Google stock was worth nearly $1.8 billion. Photobucket is being acquired for just less than 1/5 of that – $250 million plus an earnout of up to $50 million At the time of the announcement of their acquisition in October 2006 YouTube had very little revenue. Photobucket, however, is on track to blow through their projection of $25 million this year. Also, the relative sizes of the two companies aren’t that far off. At the time of the acquisition, Comscore suggested that YouTube had approximately 25 million U.S. monthly visitors. Today, Photobucket has around 20 million U.S. monthly visitors, or 80% of what YouTube had when it was acquired. Photobucket has 40 million registered users and is gaining another 85,000 or so per day. Their users are highly active, and upload a lot of content to the network. YouTube’s registered users were far below Photobucket’s 40 million at the time of their acquisition. YouTube had (and still has) a lot of traffic coming to the site to view videos, but far fewer users actually creating and posting content. Leaving revenue aside, the traffic numbers indicate a comparable price of $1.3 billion for Photobucket, 4x the price they actually received from MySpace. To look at this another way, YouTube was paid about $67 per unique visitor. Photobucket got just $13. Did Google overpay for YouTube? Did MySpace get Photobucket for a steal? Perhaps both. But in the end, being no. 1 in a category means you get a premium on acquisition. In the case of YouTube, that premium seems to be about 4x. Another factor: Photobucket just didn’t generate the bidding hype that YouTube saw. It looks like the final bidders were IAC and MySpace, with a number of other bidders falling off in the last few weeks (perhaps spooked by the MySpace blockage of Photobucket videos). In a year or so this deal is likely to look as brilliant for NewsCorp (which owns MySpace) as the MySpace acquisition was. → Read More
Apparently an overzealous Photobucket employee is the source of this rumor, but we’ve confirmed it with more senior people: MySpace is acquiring Photobucket for $250 million in cash. We’re hearing that there is also an earn-out for up to an additional $50 million. Photobucket has been looking for a buyer since March, when they hired Lehman Brothers to help sell the company. They were looking for $300 million or more, but may have had few bidders other than MySpace. The companies have been in serious acquisition discussions for the last couple of weeks – A dispute that involved Photobucket videos being blocked on MySpace led to acquisition discussions, and the block was removed. Photobucket generated $6.3 million in revenue last year and planned on hitting $25 million or more this year. They have 40 million registered users and add another 85,000 per day. Our first coverage of Photobucket was a year ago. They’ve raised $15 million over two rounds of financing. → Read More
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. → Read More
There was a lot of fingerpointing, denials, and “he said, she said” going on today as everyone digested the news that MySpace had blocked PhotoBucket’s 40 million members from embedding videos into their MySpace pages. From my perspective this looks like MySpace just found an excuse to send a big middle finger to the largest independent widget company in the hope of disrupting their ongoing acquisition talks. Om Malik sees things differently and thinks Photobucket practically asked for this blockade (although see his more recent take). Robert Scoble calls Photobucket and services like it “parasitic.” Nick Carr says this is all basically inevitable, regardless of who’s to blame. But the important question isn’t who’s fault this is. What is more interesting looking forward is, can Photobucket survive without MySpace? I say yes. Photobucket isn’t like YouTube, which was deeply unprofitable from day one. They’ve been at or near profitability for a long time, dipping back into the red to grow headcount and infrastructure. They have a diversified revenue stream – some from premium accounts and most from on-site advertising. I took a look at their leaked revenue numbers from last month. Most of Photobucket’s revenue is generated from on-site advertising – 63% of it in 2005, and 68% in 2006. In the leaked documents the company says they’ll do $32 million in revenue this year. That projection is probably dead on because it is being distributed to potential buyers – any future variance could kill a deal in progress and so they are probably being very conservative. That advertising revenue isn’t going anywhere. Unlike 2006, Photobucket is now set up as a destination site – a good hedge against exactly what MySpace did last night. The company says that over half of video views are now on their site (and generating advertising revenue), way up from a year ago. They also say that only 25% of their users embed videos at MySpace. At their current growth rate, even a permanent ban only sets them back six months or less in terms of users and page views. And many MySpace/Photobucket users will simply leave MySpace and go to one of its many competitors rather than lose the ability to embed their Photobucket media. Re-creating a profile at another social network takes a lot less time than re-uploading hours of video. In the end, Photobucket could prove to be stickier than MySpace. → Read More
Sometime around 10:30 pm PST tonight, MySpace began blocking videos embedded on MySpace pages that originate from Photobucket. This is a major blackout, affecting millions of embedded videos. Photobucket images and slideshows are not affected. Videos from competitors like YouTube are still working fine. As with previous outages, embedded videos work fine until the user makes any edit to their profile. At that time, links to Photobucket are automatically replaced with “…” or removed, causing the embed to fail. Photobucket has north of 40 million registered users. This is turning into a habit for MySpace, which usually claims bugs, security issues or terms of service violations were the cause of a shut down. In January MySpace mysteriously shut down all Flash widgets on the site for 2.5 hours. An Imeem blockade came next. Vidilife, Stickam and Revver have been permanently banned. Today’s shutdown of Photobucket comes suspiciously close to news that Photobucket is up for sale (Fox, MySpace’s parent company, was notoriously rumored to be furious when YouTube sold to Google). It seems that just when a company starts to break out from the pack, MySpace finds a security breach and shuts them down. Even though MySpace has flat out denied it to us, it is our belief that these blockages are meant to send a clear message to widget companies – don’t forget that MySpace is in charge. More as this develops. I have a request for comment into MySpace PR, but I don’t expect to hear back from them until the morning. Update: see The Photobucket blog for more details (read the comments to that post – Photobucket users are really angry. Update: Photobucket CEO Alex Welch just sent me the following email: Mike, Tonight MySpace took the decision to prevent Photobucket users from posting certain types of media to their MySpace pages. This action by MySpace means that millions of pieces of content created by our users may no longer be available on MySpace. This content represents hundreds of thousand hours of effort on the part of our users – hours invested using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. Conservative estimates put one in every two page views on MySpace containing content from Photobucket users. This step will have a drastic affect on the usability and appeal of MySpace. More importantly, by limiting the ability of its users to personalize their → Read More
Silicon Valley/Colorado based photo and video sharing site Photobucket has 36 million registered users and adds another 85,000 per day. If the growth rate continues, they’ll have 60 million users by the end of the year. More users visit Photobucket each month – 17 million, than Facebook. 56% of those users are under 35, and 52% are female. 300,000 unique websites link back to Photobucket. They move a lot of data. Fortune wrote a long article on the company yesterday – the first time mainstream press has noticed this already large startup. Photobucket generates revenue through premium accounts, and advertising on the site. The rumor is that they are nearing break even, and aren’t spending much of the $15 million they’ve raised in venture capital ($8 million or so is left in the bank). Basically, Photobucket is kicking butt. So the question is, how much are they worth? Lehman Brothers, the investment bank they’ve hired to explore a sale of the company, is saying $300 – $400 million or more in private talks with potential buyers. Included in the documents distributed to buyers is a revenue breakdown of the company by year. In 2005, Photobucket revenue was $4.35 million, growing to $9.34 million in 2006 and on pace to hit over $32 million this year. Last year, advertising accounted for 68% of revenue. This year, they estimate it will grow to 79%. See full revenue breakdown in the image below. Photobucket wouldn’t comment on this article, but our sources indicate that a number of acquirors are very interested in the company at this price. Given revenue growth and another deal in this space, this might be cheap. It also looks like Photobucket will be sporting a new home page design soon. Screen shot is below. → Read More
Ever since the social video market boomed through 2006, some video services have sought to differentiate themselves by adding online editors. Jumpcut and Motionbox launched their editors last April and Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! 5 months later. Eyespot launched its editor a month before Jumpcut, last March. Last December Gotuit launched their SceneMaker video mashup app. Photobucket recently coming launched its own video/audio/photo editor for premium members (full release next month). Today, Cuts is launching its editor into public beta. If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities. Here’s a look at each of the services, followed by a more in depth chart comparing features. Cuts “Simple and easy, when you need edits now” Cuts is the new kid on the block and is all about remixing viral video. They don’t host content, but instead take videos from other sites (YouTube, Google, Myspace). With Cuts you can trim, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows. See also our early look at Cuts a few weeks ago. Gotuit “For slicing and dicing scenes” Gotuit Scenemaker is for slicing out scenes from videos on other networks. After importing a video into the program via URL, you can select a start and end for one or more scenes on the video, title, tag, and email the scenes to friends. Unfortunately I couldn’t use it to slice up Gotuit content. Eyespot “Mashups with effects, transitions, and titles” Eyespot is a solid editor that lets you mix together your own Motionbox content or scenes from their promotional media packs. It has a simple drag and drop interface that lets you manage a wide variety of effects and transitions for both the audio and video layers. Eyespot lets you add your own audio and mix in photos as well. While you can’t grab video from other networks, Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available → Read More
The latest Flash photo/video/sound editing tools that we mentioned last week are now enabled at Photobucket for premium users, and will go live for all users in March. Geoff Baum at Adobe confirmed that these tools are not yet available anywhere on the web except for Photobucket. The new tool allows PhotoBucket users to mash up photos, video and stock music files into a single slide show/video and then display those mashups on any website. The screen shots below help describe some of what they are doing, but the key changes that make the tools better than what Motionbox, JumpCut (acquired by Yahoo), and Cuts are offering on the video side and Slide and RockYou on the photo side are just how fast and easy it is to make one of these. I stopped by the Photobucket offices earlier this week for a run through, and we created a photo and video mashup and added music in a matter of moments. An example: http://s0005.photobucket.com/remix/player.swf?videoURL=http://vid0005.photobucket.com/albums/0005/PhotobucketPreview_50/fad59286.pbr&hostname=stream0005.photobucket.com Users are restricted from uploading their own audio files (copyright concerns drove this), but Photobucket says they may add a record button to allow a narrative of the photo/video stream in the future. For now, a selection of licensed stock music is available. Users can also add transition effects, text bubbles, frames and other effects to the mashup. Since these tools were created by Adobe they’ll be available to Photobucket’s competitors as well, and I expect similar products to be launched by those competitors in the near future. By being first, though, Photobucket gets a head start over these other companies. How significant that advantage is, is yet to be seen. Photobucket is based in Colorado and Silicon Valley, and has 60 employees. They’ve raised $15 million over two rounds of financing. Screenshots below: → Read More
We are expecting Photobucket and Adobe to jointly announce a new Flash based tool for Photobucket users within the next couple of weeks. The tool will allow users to mash up videos, photos and music clips into a timeline, and add titles, transitions and other effects, and then embedded into blogs, social networks like Myspace, and other sites. Adobe has been steadily increasing the power of their Flash-based video editing tools. In early 2006, startups like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox launched early platforms for editing video online. More recently, Cuts.com announced even more advanced tools for their upcoming beta. It’s not clear if the tools being adopted by Photobucket are more advanced than those used by Cuts.com, although the fact that Adobe will be participating in the announcement suggests they are taking this partnership seriously. Slide, RockYou and the seriously hurting Filmloop all offer users the ability to create simple photo slideshows and show them off using a Flash based widget. Look for them to try to quickly add these new Flash video features as well to avoid losing users to Photobucket. As silly as all this photo and video uploading and mashing up sounds, it’s popular stuff. Photobucket is a profitable company already, and Slide was rumored to be valued as much as $100 million after their last round of financing, with no revenue to date. Photobucket already commands third place among video sharing sites (after YouTube and Myspace), after launching the functionality just last April. About 35,000 videos are uploaded to Photobucket daily. → Read More
San Francisco based Piczo, a social network for young teenagers, continues to add 35,000 new registered users per day, and claims 2 billion monthly page views. We first covered them back in September, where we compared them with the other major social networks. The UK continues to be Piczo’s biggest market, accounting for 40% of users and 50% of page views (see TechCrunch UK coverage of the company here). Today at 5 am PST they will announce a number of distribution and other partnerships with major Internet companies, including YouTube, Flock, Photobucket and VideoEgg. The most interesting partnership is the deal with Flock. Piczo will distribute a Piczo-branded version of the Flock browser (see a similar deal Flock announced in July with PhotoBucket). Flock and Piczo will split search revenue generated from the browser, and users will have easy access to Piczo content. From the press release: When users download the Flock Piczo Edition browser, they will receive alerts when friends update their sites, providing an instant connection to their Piczo friends. Users will also be able to quickly and easily drag and drop content such as photos and videos into their Piczo Web page. Other features in the Flock Piczo Edition browser include access to bulk upload tools, uninterrupted login and web searching capabilities. This is good news for Flock as well. They now have access to Piczo’s 10.5 million monthly unique visitors. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
