Following the recent speculation that image/ video hosting site Photobucket is on the market, the News Corp owned MySpace has moved to block Photobucket hosted videos in MySpace profiles in what can only be described as the ultimate act of corporate sabotage.
Photobucket currently has 39 million registered users and over 2.6 billion photos and videos hosted.
Photobucket is naturally down playing the effect of the MySpace blockage, stating that their business extends across various social networking sites, even going so far to suggest that Photobucket MySpace users may abandon using MySpace for competitors that support Photobucket video includes….yeah right, entire communities of people are going to abandon MySpace because of this. ROFL.
The question of course then becomes whether Photobucket is screwed, or just plain screwed over. I’ve got no way of knowing what percentage of Photobucket traffic comes from MySpace, and we are only talking a block on video content so far, so it’s fairly safe to say that Photobucket isn’t screwed, but given the investors are chasing between $300-$400 million for the company, you could probably easily knock $50-$100 million of the sales price now, if not possibly more, because when your product targets social networks and you’ve had access partially blocked to the biggest marketplace of them all…with the possibility of course that the ban could end up involving all content, your value drops, and drops dramatically…and because of this there’s little doubt that News Corp has simply just screwed Photobucket over. I wonder if News Corp ends up buying Photobucket? What better way to squeeze a better price! 🙂
