News Corp to Purchase Photobucket 78
DJCacophony writes "Reuters is reporting that Newscorp, having already purchased Myspace, is purchasing the image hosting site Photobucket for between 250 and 300 million dollars. The story details how Photobucket and Myspace, which have previously had disputes over advertising on each others' sites, will now be integrated with each other. The deal is still very much on the table, apparently, and may yet fall through. 'While hardly known outside the youthful world of social network sites, Photobucket has become wildly popular with users for providing free, online storage tools for multimedia self-expression, from photos to videos to digital slideshows. Site builders turn to it for images to decorate their sites. The four-year-old startup, based in Palo Alto, California, has signed up 41 million registered users, up from 32 million at the end of last year and 2 million in 2004. It now hosts nearly 2.8 billion images on the site.'"
The Pokey Mon Effect (Score:4, Insightful)
Kinka-chu!
Just a prediction, but I've yet to see Murdoch turn his purchases into anything but short-term banalities.
Mod me troll, but it's like Yahoo! buying Broadcast.com (Mark Cuban's org). $2B was spent-- in cash-- and does anyone buy mp3s from Yahoo?
Strange coincidences? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Buying their way in? (Score:5, Insightful)
And beyond going public, getting bought is a huge pay day for those stock holders (or just the initial investors if the company is still private).
I feel sorry the employees at these companies, though. After this purchase, Photobucket may "reorganize to make its operation more efficient."
Re:Forgetfullness (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Buying their way in? (Score:4, Insightful)
Think about your own use of internet services. When Google bought blogger.com, if you were a google user, did you switch? Over a billion images are hosted on PhotoBucket. Okay, so MySpace kludges in a picture feature, too. But, PhotoBucket still has those billions of images. Are users going to go through the effort of moving those pictures? Even if MySpace made it one-click? Probably not. That would mean having to re-edit links on pages, e-mail your friends of the change. Blah, blah blah. I think you see where I am going with this. MySpace could certainly try and grow their own photo storage, but this deal gives Newscorp billions of images NOW.
Users tend to stick with what worked for them yesterday. Switching is a pain.
Re:Sure Evidence.... (Score:3, Insightful)
For a small fraction of that price, they could have just made a much better service and taken the users that way.