Around 10:30 PM on April 10, MySpace started to remove Photobucket videos and slideshows. YouTube videos are still embeddable. The reason was that Photobucket violated MySpace terms of services. After that, questions were asked whether Photobucket would survive without MySpace. Photobucket currently has 40 million members.
Earlier this afternoon, I read an interesting article by LeeAnn Prescott, a Research Director at HitWise. In the article, said on Wednesday, April 11, the day that most of the Photobucket videos and slideshows were being removed, Photobucket traffic increased 3.9%. “Photobucket accounted for 73% of Photography category visits leaving MySpace (1.60/2.19) Photobucket is by far the most dominant photo website for MySpace users,” wrote Prescott.
What does that mean for MySpace? This means that either users are forced to seek Photobucket alternatives to embed on their MySpace pages or essentially start from scratch. Fortunately for them, MySpace has their own Slideshows feature. Is MySpace asking their users to make a choice? One of those “it’s either them or us” scenarios.
BusinessWeek claims that MySpace Plays Chicken with Users. “MySpace allows its users to embed video, slideshows, and other features from third parties so long as they comply with our terms of service. Photobucket recently began running an ad-sponsored slideshow and encouraged users to post these ads in bulletins and profiles throughout the community. We spoke to the company about their actions, but they refused to respect our community’s terms and we had no choice but to disable their service,” wrote MySpace in a statement.
Alex Welch, a founder and the CEO of Photobucket said that the company was never contacted by MySpace. “In general it goes back to brands wanting to interact with users, but it’s the user who has really chosen this route. And they don’t think it’s fair for that outlet to now be taken away from them, and neither do we,” he said.
MySpace users, who are you going to choose… Photobucket or MySpace?
