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MySpace Buys Photobucket?

Valleywag is reporting that MySpace has bought Photobucket. They say that MySpace may announce the deal some time this morning.

This acquisition makes a lot of sense and has for quite some time. I’m surprised it hadn’t happened earlier, but Photobucket was likely just trying to hold out for as large a price tag as they could get.

In my mind one of the biggest unrealized values of Photobucket is in the size of it’s library of images. By unrealized values I mean that although they likely have the largest collection of images in any one repository, the images are not organized, ranked and categorized like you might find at Flickr.

Photobucket has always maintained that they don’t want to build their own community like Flickr. That they simply want to be an easy place to host images. However, as their library gets bigger and bigger, figuring out a way to make sense of these images will unlock even greater value than a simple photo hosting service.

Update: Rumor on the price is $250 million.

4 Replies to “MySpace Buys Photobucket?”

  1. Hi Thomas,

    I believe Microsoft’s photo stuff has 8 billion images (4 million per day being added), and I think WebShots may have even more.

    So I’m not sure Photobucket has the world’s largest online repository – I don’t think they have 8B yet.

    But maybe I’m wrong?

  2. Hey Don. I’m not sure which of Microsoft’s image library products you are talking about.

    But in terms of Photobucket vs. Webshots, Photobucket today has roughly 2.7 billion images online. This is vs. Webshots approximately 488 million. Webshots has been losing significant momentum over the course of the past few years and Flickr also will shortly pass them in total images if they have not done so already. Certainly once Flickr assimilates much of Yahoo Images roughly 2 billion images they will get a lot closer to Photobucket.

    Photobucket, in terms of number of images, though from a photo sharing site is the largest I believe.

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