Photobucket to be acquired by MySpace
Rumours of photobucket acquisition by MySpace are now confirmed, for $250m. There is much discussion comparing this acquisition to Google’s YouTube buy last year. Photobucket is currently getting around 80% of the unique visitors that YouTube was getting at around the time it was acquired for $1.65bn, showing that on this metric at least Photobucket is undervalued compared with what YouTube achieved. Obviously its not as clearcut as unique visitors though.
Photobucket has around 40m registered users and is adding around 85,000 a day.
Using the ‘unique visitors’ metric, YouTube was paid around $67/head, and photobucket is at around $13.
This recent news throws more light on the story a few weeks ago about MySpace blocking photobucket content. What a negotiating tactic, several other potential bidders are said to have been scared off by the move.