Features

Photobucket is usually used for personal photographic albums, remote storage of avatars displayed on internet forums, and storage of videos. Photobucket's image hosting is often used for eBay, MySpace (now a corporate cousin), Bebo, Neopets and Facebook accounts, LiveJournals or other blogs, and message boards. Users may keep their albums private, allow password-protected guest access, or open them to the public.

Photobucket advertises 99.9% uptime, and offers 1 GB free storage (10 GB with paid PRO account), 25 GB (was 100GB but went to 25GB in July 2008) free monthly bandwidth. Uploaded photos must be smaller than 1 MB (5 MB with paid account), uploaded videos must be five minutes or shorter (10 min with paid account).

Since Photobucket does not allow sexually explicit content, they may remove content due to violations of their TOS.

Photobucket supports FTP uploads, but the user must be a Pro account holder. Windows XP Publisher is supported as an alternative to FTP. It is available in free accounts.

History

Photobucket was named the fastest growing site of 2005 according to Nielsen/Netratings and now ranks as a Top 50 site by traffic according to ComScore. As of August 2008, Photobucket claims to have over 5.7 billion images uploaded to its site. Since new members are constantly joining, this results in more simultaneous uploads and thus the rate at which the numbers climb is constantly increasing. In March, 2007 Photobucket had a market share of 41.4 percent of U.S. visits to photography web sites. As of March 28, 2007 Fortune Magazine reports that Photobucket has 36 million registered users and adds 85,000 new users per day. Fortune Magazine claims that more users visit Photobucket each month than Facebook. 56% of users are under 35, and 52% are female. According to TechCrunch, 300,000 unique websites link back to Photobucket.http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/29/how-much-is-photobucket-worth/ TechCrunch

Photobucket's investment bank, Lehman Brothers, values the company at $300–$400 million or more.. But that valuation is strongly doubted by other tech analysts, whose most optimistic estimates are between $100-$200 million.

JUNE 17, 2008. Photobucket was effectively taken down (off-line) by hackers in Turkey, who changed the Photobucket IP address on several U.S. Domain-Name Systems (DNS) servers.

Acquisition by News Corporation

As of May 8, 2007, it was reported that Fox Interactive Media, a News Corporation subsidiary, were in advanced talks with Photobucket about a possible buyout. The price is rumored to be as high as $250 million US. On May 30, Fox Interactive Media confirmed that it had bought Photobucket and Flektor in separate transactions. Terms were not disclosed.