Home › DMW Daily › May 7, 2007

Rumor Mill: MySpace Buying Photobucket

Authored by Jay Baage on May 7, 2007 - 10:18am.
Photobucket, a popular site for storing, sharing, and publishing visual digital media, has concluded terms of a sale to Myspace, News Corporation's social network, according to the tech gossip rag Valleywag. If the deal is for real, it will be an interesting resolution to a quarrelsome but symbiotic relationship between the two companies.

After final negotiations at the end of last week, Photobucket has called an all-hands staff meeting for 10am PST this morning, according to Valleywag:

“Lehman Brothers -- seeking a valuation over $300m for a venture that only made $6.3m in revenues last year -- talked up the likelihood of a bidding war for Photobucket. But Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the parent of Myspace, was always the most likely buyer. And the jostling between the two companies -- Myspace's bullying, and Photobucket's public protest -- were always part of the negotiations.”

Photobucket, founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, has thirty-three million users with an average two and a half million more joining monthly. The site is linking billions of personal photos, graphics, slideshows and videos daily to hundreds of thousands of web sites, including: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, eBay, Craigslist, Blogger and Xanga.

News Corp.’s stock was up 1.10% on Monday and the DMW100 Index was up 0.26%.

On a side note, Photobucket's CEO and Co-Founder Alex Welch is going to hold a key note address at Digital Media Wire and Potomac Tech Wire’s Digital Media Conference on June 22, 2007 in Washington DC.

Joakim Baage

Published in DMW Daily, May 7, 2007
tags: Deals | Internet | MySpace | Photobucket | News Corp. | UGC | Valleywag |



Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.