Update:
Mike Arrington at TechCrunch says he has been able to confirm the deal with some “senior people” (the Valleywag rumour was apparently the work of an “overzealous employee,” according to Mike — a little professional jealousy?), and the price is $250-million. Not bad for something that had revenue of about $6-million last year. Pete Cashmore at Mashable says that he has also confirmed the deal is happening. Mike runs the numbers on the deal in an update.
Original post:
Given the source, we should probably take this with a rather large container of salt, but Valleywag says that Photobucket is about to be acquired by MySpace. Rumour or not, this makes a lot of sense to me — a whole lot more sense than Microsoft and Yahoo, last week’s favourite rumour. Yes, the two have been feuding rather publicly, but that’s because their services are so intertwined with each other. Photobucket accounts for more than 70 per cent of MySpace’s photo traffic, according to Hitwise. In other words, it has pretty much the same relationship to MySpace as PayPal had to eBay way back when.
It made sense for eBay to bring PayPal in house, and I think it would make a lot of sense for MySpace to do the same. And Photobucket has reportedly been on the auction block — the only issue now is whether MySpace will pay what the company’s backers are looking for. I would say this one has an 80-per-cent chance of actually happening.