Yesterday Myspace announced the acquisition of Photobucket, an enormous online photo-sharing site. The announcement was a bit of a surprise, considering that less than a month ago, Myspace placed a two-week ban on Photobucket for “breaking terms of service”. Perhaps more surprising than the acquisition’s announcement is the acquisition price – a mere $250 million. For a website with over 40 million registered users, that accounts for 73% of Myspace’s photo traffic, and that’s the number one most visited downstream site for online photo sharing, analysts are calling Photobucket “a steal”. Considering that YouTube, a site with roughly the same amount of unique users, went for over 5x as much in Google stock, it seems like Photobucket got a poor deal.
On the other hand, comparing Photobucket to Youtube is kind of apples to oranges – it’s more appropriate to point out that other photo-sharing sites, notably Flickr, have gone for much less. Mark Evans writes, “Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are having yet another round of sellers’ remorse given they sold their photo-sharing company to Yahoo for about $50-million in 2005.”
Comparisons aside, most critics agree that the two sites go well together. Myspace and Photobucket share such a significant user-base that, as Valleywag aptly puts it, “Like a squabbling couple finally realizing they can’t live without eachother — or a parasite fusing with its host…” the deal makes sense.
Futher Reading
- Photobucket Was a Steal v. Google/YouTube (TechCruch)
- YouTube vs Photobucket: Who’s really cheap here? (Fred Destin)
- MyPhotobucket (The next.net)
