As Valleywag reported yesterday, MySpace has just acquired Photobucket for $250 million. The move from MySpace was welcomed by Photobucket, who were having difficulties lately due to high bandwith costs, and were looking for some time for someone to buy them. However, the price is less then what Photobucket expected. Currently the number one photo sharing service in the world, Photobucket got to feel last month just how much of their service is done by MySpace users. MySpace blocked for a while videos stored on the Photobucket servers, and while the reason wasn’t clear at that time, we can safely say now that it was a tactic to make PhotoBucket drop the price. A bit shady, but nice strategy. Since around 80% of the Photobucket users are also MySpace users, the overlap is pretty big, and Photobucket would’ve had difficulty selling to anyone else, after the display of force done by MySpace last month.

The good news is that there is still some hope for photo sharing websites. Nobody was buying them for large sums of money, because of the high costs and very low means of monetization. Flickr for example was sold for $25 million. They might not be sold for larger sums of money, since Photobucket was the leader, but they got a better potential then was initially thought.

Others that wrote about this: Valleywag, TechCrunch, Mike Abundo, John Wilson, ThinkTechno, Geeky Guide, Fred Destin, Mashable

Tags: myspace, photobucket, flickr

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