Earlier today it was made official, after much speculation, that Photobucket had been acquired by Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp. CNET News.com spoke with Photobucket CEO and co-founder Alex Welch on Wednesday morning to hash out some of the rumors and talk about what's in store for the popular image-sharing site.
According to Welch, the company put itself up for sale in order to accelerate growth beyond its current membership base of approximately 42 million. "When we look at Fox, it was really a natural choice for Photobucket because we really want to grow out our brand globally," he said. "It was really about taking that next step much sooner and much faster."
Rumors had suggested that the acquisition would be on the part of the Fox Interactive-owned MySpace, but as it turns out, Photobucket will be an individual Fox Interactive property--not a division of MySpace. "All of our discussions have been directly with Fox Interactive Media," Welch explained. "Photobucket is going to be acquired by Fox Interactive, and Photobucket is going to remain a standalone company within Fox Interactive."
Photobucket will indeed remain intact, but Welch said that the company has "a very detailed product roadmap over the next couple years" concerning its new involvement with Fox Interactive. He hinted that some of the company's other brands, like gaming site IGN.com, may come into play.
Tech news junkies have probably been wondering exactly how the deal came to fruition, considering the much-publicized spat between Photobucket and MySpace when the social networking site decided to block all videos and slideshows from Photobucket last month. The conflict, which stemmed from Photobucket's advertising tie-ins with Spider-Man 3, was eventually resolved. But then acquisition rumors started to swirl, and it all seemed a little bit disjointed.
Obviously, a lot of the details can't be publicly disclosed. But Welch was able to say that that was because Photobucket had been in discussion with Fox Interactive, not its MySpace division. There hadn't initially been much communication between the acquisition talks with Fox Interactive and the terms-of-service debate with MySpace. "We'd been in discussion with a number of parties, including Fox. The incident that happened was between Photobucket and MySpace, not Photobucket and Fox. It was an isolated incident," Welch said. "We resolved the issues by opening up discussions between the companies," and then the acquisition talks with Fox Interactive were able to continue while Photobucket's widgets returned to MySpace.
From what it sounds like, things appear to be running smoothly now.
The announcement from Fox Interactive on Wednesday also revealed that, as rumored, the company had acquired media mashup tool Flektor. But Welch said that there isn't any immediate collaboration between Photobucket and Flektor--yet. Instead, Photobucket is going to focus on its own growth. "As of right now, we're going to continue to build our our toolset to really satisfy our users, to give them really interesting things to do with media."
It's official: MySpace.com parent company Fox Interactive Media has formally announced its agreements to acquire image-sharing site Photobucket and slide show mashup creator Flektor. Financial terms of the purchases were not disclosed by Fox Interactive Media, which is a division of media giant News Corp.
Both acquisitions had been rumored for some time. The Photobucket deal, originally reported earlier this month, is inarguably the more significant of the two: Photobucket, after all, is the 34th most visited site on the Web, with over 42 million users and 17 million monthly visitors. Its history with Fox Interactive Media hasn't been smooth: There was well-publicized friction between the two companies when MySpace blocked Photobucket's embeddable video and slide show widgets in April, citing a terms-of-service violation related to a Spider-Man 3 advertising campaign. Later in April, Photobucket announced that an accord had been reached with MySpace, and within weeks, the acquisition rumors began to fly. The rumored price has been about $250 million.
In a post on Photobucket's official blog, co-founder Alex Welch wrote that "we expect nothing to change in our day-to-day operations," and that "the plan is to operate Photobucket as an independent, standalone company within FIM."
As for Flektor, reputedly a $10 million to $20 million purchase for Fox Interactive Media, initial reports circulated on TechCrunch several weeks ago. Flektor, which lets people edit audio, video and photos to create their own embeddable slide shows, was founded just last year.
Photobucket and Flektor, however, will not become MySpace properties as many of the early reports had hinted; they'll instead be Fox Interactive Media brands, alongside MySpace as well as IGN.com and Rotten Tomatoes.
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