The world of digital photography had a shot in the arm yesterday when Facebook picked up Instagram for $1 billion, and it’s perhaps a sign of how all players in that space now need to up their game. Today brings news of a development from Photobucket, the online photo site that scored a huge deal last year when Twitter announced that it would power its image service. Photobucket has signed a deal with Pixlr, the cloud-based photo editing service from Autodesk, in which Pixlr’s tools will be integrated on to Photobucket’s site.
The deal will see Pixlr replace Photobucket’s current editing service, FotoFlexer, which had been working with the site since 2008. → Read More
It’s been two and a half months since Twitter first unveiled their own photo sharing service, in partnership with Photobucket. Just last week, they finished rolling it out to all users. Today, they’re taking the next step: opening it up to third-party developers.
As they’ve just announced on the Twitter Developers blog, there’s a new Photo Upload API that’s ready for developers outside the company to play around with. While plenty of third-party Twitter services have had photo uploads for a while, they often use their own method for doing it, or use a bigger player like TwitPic or yFrog. With the new API, they’ll be able to upload, store, and servce the images on Twitter’s servers in conjunction with Photobucket. → Read More
So now that we know that the Twitter Photos is very real (as we first reported), the next question is: when can we actually use it? In their initial announcement, Twitter said that the product would roll-out to users in the “next several weeks”. But today brings a bit more specific timeline. Initial roll-out to users will begin next week.
Twitter’s PR team has just sent out a tweet updating users. “Currently, Twitter employees can upload #photos to Twitter.com. We’ll start slowly rolling this out to users next week,” Twitter’s Carolyn Penner writes. You can see a collection of early pictures here. Again, Twitter employees have already begun tweeting with the new feature, using the pic.twitter.com URL. → Read More
Yesterday, leading up to today’s announcement of Twitter’s new photo sharing capabilities, we reported hearing that Twitter had approached some ecosystem players months ago about their potential move into the arena. One player not consulted? A massive one: Twitpic.
“We never heard from Twitter that they were building a photo feature,” Twitpic founder Noah Everett tells us. That’s interesting since yFrog and Plixi (formerly Tweetphoto) were approached, we’ve heard. Also clearly approached, Photobucket, which ended up scoring a deal to host the images for Twitter.
Twitpic, the longtime leader in the space, understandably, is annoyed by this. → Read More
Twitter has just announced on their blog two new key bits of functionality: improved search and photos. The latter, we’ve obviously been all over in recent days, as we first broke the news a couple days ago. The former, we mentioned was likely coming as well. But there are a few details we didn’t know.
First of all, today brings a completely new version of Twitter Search that promises “more relevant” tweets, but also shows you related pictures and videos in the right-side pane. Even more interesting is that Twitter has partnered with Mozilla for a new version of the Firefox browser with Twitter built into the search bar. (There is also an add-on for current Firefox users.) → Read More
It’s been over a year since we’ve last written about Photobucket, when the former News Corp. / MySpace property merged with Ontela.
Apparently, the Photobucket that came out of the merger didn’t technically have a chief executive at the helm, although CFO Tom Munro served as acting President. The company this morning announced that Munro has now been officially appointed CEO after an executive search was initiated by Steamboat Ventures, the Disney-affiliated venture capital firm backing Photobucket. → Read More
Image hosting service Tinypic just killed off its service to all international users. According to reports, users in countries other than US, UK and Australia are now seeing the message above.
From what we’re seeing on various blogs, users both restricted and unrestricted are unhappy about the move calling for a Tinypic boycott as well as figuring out a work around. → Read More
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%. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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 → Read More
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. → Read More
Understatement of the day: Apps are in. Having already released an iPhone app, it should come as no surprise that Photobucket has teamed up with T-Mobile and Danger to create mobile Photobucket apps for select T-Mo handsets and Danger’s Sidekick. → Read More
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? → Read More
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. → Read More
Whenever people remember to use that camera on the back of their phone, what do they do with it? Do they go out into the wild and try to capture what Ansel Adams’ work would look like through a crappy VGA sensor? No. They go and take pictures of themselves with the bathroom mirror, or snap a shot of their drunken friends for later uploading and sharing. Recognizing this, Verizon has gone and removed a bit of the kludge from the process, teaming up with Photobucket.com to crank out an application for instant photo sharing from VZW handsets. The application will set you back 3 bucks a month, and is available now through Verizon’s Get It Now catalog. Of course, you could always just use Photobucket’s long available mobile-to-email method and save a couple dollars a month, but I’m sure there are plenty of would-be uploaders out there who might be a bit mystified by anything but a purposed, spoon-fed application. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. CrunchBase Information Photobucket Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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. CrunchBase Information Photobucket Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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