Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures.[1][2] It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.
Angel Financing
Photobucket's initial funding came from a group named Insight Venture LLC, a shell corporation set up by Insight Venture Partners to invest in PhotoBucket. The shell structure allowed partners of Insight Venture Partners to cherry pick the deal for themselves and invest personally. It also cut Insight Venture Partner's limited partners out of the deal. While cherry picking deals for personal investment is not an isolated practice in the venture capital industry, the personal investment made by the partners of Insight Venture Partners has drawn controversy because they used the Insight Venture Partner name to make the investment, when in fact, none of the investment came from an Insight Venture Partner fund. Furthermore, the Photobucket investment made a 30 times return for the general partners personally, but the limited partners received nothing. The practice of cherry picking good deals for personal investment violates the general partners fiduciary duties to their limited partners and opens general partners to lawsuits.
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 (5 GB with paid PRO account), 25 GB (was 100GB but went to 25GB in July 2008) free monthly bandwidth. Windows XP Publisher is supported as an alternative to FTP. It is available in free accounts.[3] (unlimited with paid account). 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.[4]
Photobucket supports FTP uploads, but the user must be a Pro account holder.[5] Windows XP Publisher is supported as an alternative to FTP. It is available in free accounts.[6]
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.[7] As of mid-December, 2007 Photobucket claims to have over 5,000,000,000 (5 billion) images uploaded to their 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.[8] 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.[9] According to TechCrunch, 300,000 unique websites link back to Photobucket.[10]
Photobucket's investment bank, Lehman Brothers, values the company at $300–$400 million or more.[10]. 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.[11] On May 30, Fox Interactive Media confirmed that it had bought Photobucket and Flektor in separate transactions.[12] Terms were not disclosed.
NeTDevilz DNS Hijacking
On June 18, 2008, a Turkish hacker group known as "NeTDevilz" hacked Photobucket by means of DNS hijacking. This has caused major disruption to the site with images and videos uploaded on the site disappearing.[13] Later on in the day, the hacked site redirected its incoming traffic to atspace.com with a message informing of Photobucket's attempts to restore the site to its original status.
The message is read as follows:
IMPORTANT! Photobucket.com problem read here: Last night Photobucket.com DNS at register.com was hacked by malicious people that are trying to compromise our business! We are in no way affiliated with such bad deeds and cooperate with photobucket in capturing these individuals. They have pointed the domain photobucket.com to an account hosted on our systems! We have blocked that and photobucked techs have restored the domain pointing to its original location! ALL account information and pictures on photobucket.com are OK, please have patience! Unfortunately the complete DNS replication usually takes 24-48 hours and during this time caches DNS records might still point to us! The normal operation of Photobucket is restored and as soon as the replication is complete there should be no further such issues! We would like to emphasize that we are in now way responsible for what happens with photobucket and all users bumping across our systems! We are a legitimate web hosting company operating since 2003 and in no way tolerate such hacking attempts! If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at abuse@zettahost.com! Thanks for your patience and understanding!
On June 20,2008 Photobucket was fixed leaving the account information fine and everything back to normal. However, the entire website is now designed with the mobile phone in mind.
So far, Photobucket's staff has not admitted the fact that the downtime was indeed a DNS hacking even after many users have shown screen-shots of the message left by the hackers. Instead they announced the following in their support forums.
“On Tuesday afternoon, some users that typed in the Photobucket.com URL were temporarily redirected to an incorrect page due to an error in our DNS hosting services. The error was fixed within an hour of its discovery, but due to the nature of the problem, some users will not have access to Photobucket for a few hours as the fix rolls out. It is important to note that only a portion of Photobucket users encountered the problem and that no Photobucket content, password information or other personal information was affected by the redirect. ”
References
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