Photobucket is a free, photo and image hosting service that empowers individuals to publish the contents of their digital life. Photobucket is continually identifying new ways for brands to reach, and engage with their audiences. Photobucket is the clear leader in image hosting, with its market share of Internet visits in September 2006 more than eight times greater than its nearest photo hosting competitor, Imageshack.

Currently going for $300 million with the earnings (a steal compared to Google/YouTube), and MySpace was acquired for $580 million, back in 2005. Photobucket was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal; it took off in 2005 as users on social network sites such as Myspace began to use the service to store and display pictures of themselves and their friends.

Having 40 million registered users and gaining by another 85,000 or so per day, Photobucket has formed a partnership with Adobe Systems Inc. Photobucket was MySpace’s number one public enemy after MySpace censored and blocked Photobucket’s new video services from being used on MySpace. It was named the fastest growing site of 2005 according to Nielsen/Netratings, and now has over 15 Million users. I believe, the company that really needs Photobucket is Kodak.

Set up to be a page view generating factory, Photobucket is very popular with bloggers as well; I think these users will be a nice addition to the news corp. stable. Photobucket currently serves over 70% of all content links to social networking web sites and serves over 3 billion images and video requests every day. It is one of the largest photo hosting sites having received more than 12M unique visitors last month. Their members will be able to easily convert their web photo albums into loops.

However, Photobucket is the loser in this battle, because it is more dependent on MySpace than vice versa. Having many advantages over other photo storage sites, Photobucket has become the largest and fastest-growing photo-sharing service on the Web. It is by far, the easiest and most reliable way for people to create, manage and share their personal media online.

Photobucket has offices in Palo Alto, California and Denver, Colorado and is located online at www.photobucket.com. Photobucket was unlikely to establish itself as a sovereign company, because the bulk of its users came from Myspace, a fact of which it was reminded, when the News Corporation social network, during negotiations, blocked access by its users to videos on Photobucket. Photobucket has partnered with FilmLoop to make it easy for users to instantly create their own photo "loops" from existing image albums by simply clicking on the "Loop It.