Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT) and News Corporation (NYSE:NWS.A) subsidiary, Photobucket have officially partnered with each other for photo printing services.  For those that have photos uploaded on Photobucket, they can go into Target stores and order prints.  So far the service is available in a majority select Target stores.

The Photobucket prints will cost $0.20 for 4″ x 6″ prints.  Pictures that are 5″ x 7″ cost $1.49 and 8″ x 10″ are $2.89 each.  The photos will be printed on glossy paper.

Target has similar partnerships with Eastman Kodak Company (NYSE:EK) and Shutterfly, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFLY).  A lot of Photobucket’s traffic was driven by the embeddable widgets that MySpace users spread.  News Corp. acquired Photobucket in May 2007.

Disclosure: Amit Chowdhry was formerly employed in Target as a Supply Chain Executive in Training.  Amit does not own any shares in the company.

Related Link:
1. Mashable

 
Ask.com, a subsidiary of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) and Photobucket, a subsidiary of News Corporation (NYSE:NWS) have partnered together.  Ask.com is now powering Photobucket’s search engine.  Ask.com will also be controlling the ads on Photobucket.

The financial details were undisclosed.  Photobucket has roughly 44 million monthly unique visitors per month. 

Photobucket also launched an iPhone application.  The application will allow users to upload images to Photobucket from the phone.  The application costs about $4.99.

“Photobucket has one of the largest online audiences, and now Ask.com provides these consumers with the answers to the questions they ask every day,” stated Andrew Moers, GM of Ask.com partnerships. “This alliance furthers our strategy to bring Ask.com to consumers worldwide through a broad range of Internet access points.”

Related Links:
Ask.com
Photobucket

As you give a goofy look at the camera pointing at you in a photo kiosk at an entertainment venue, you begin to wonder what captions and background you’ll use.  Now take this concept, slap it on the Internet in the form of a widget that can be Facebooked or MySpaced, and you’re ready to raise $50 million.

Business-savvy Internet entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder, Max Levchin did exactly that, as mentioned in BusinessWeek.  Slide raised $50 million and increased their valuation to $500 million.  This fourth round of investment was provided by Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price.

Photo widget companies is a proven model for acquisition targets, but is also a proven model for its vulnerability of mooching on other social networks’ user base.  For example, Photobucket was acquired by News Corp. in May 2007 at a price of $250 million in cash.  But before the acquisition, MySpace completely blocked Photobucket from accessing their users because of an advertising violation before making a truce. 

Altogether, Slide has raised over $75 million including investments from other PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel and venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla.  Thiel is an early investor of Facebook.  The other founders of Slide include Jared Kopf and Scott Banister, both also former PayPal employees.

Previous Slide coverage is available at: http://pulse2.com/category/slide/.

Subsidiary photo hosting company of News Corp./Fox Interactive Media/MySpace, Photobucket is introducing a new feature that revolves around “tagging.” Flickr has been utilizing tagging around its pictures for quite some time now, so this is just a way for Photobucket to play catch-up. Tagging means that a user inputs specific keywords that makes searching for media easier.

Let’s say that I upload a picture of Taj Mahal, some appropriate tags to put for the picture would be “Agra” and “India.” This way when someone visits Photobucket and your picture is public, the visitor can easily find your picture by searching for those terms.

How was Photobucket’s search based before? Users could only find pictures based on their titles. Why did Alex Welch, founder of Photobucket hesitate to add the tag feature earlier? Tag integrity. Users have the power to lie about what their pictures actually are to attract more visitors. This problem is very commonplace in the tagging feature for videos uploaded to YouTube.

For example, users may search for “bear” “eating” “salmon” but may end up finding a video of baby Lola eating some salmon, green beans, and bread. Therefore, I can see why Photobucket didn’t implement this feature right away. Well played, Welch. Well played.

Recently, MySpace and Photobucket made a truce. The truce was that Photobucket would not violate MySpace’s terms of services again. The terms of service was that if Photobucket widgets and videos were to be embedded in MySpace profiles, there should not be advertisements contained. Especially because MySpace would not be benefitting from the revenue that Photobucket would be generating from the ads.

On April 24, the truce was made, but now MySpace wants to be more than just friends. It was confirmed today that MySpace has acquired Photobucket according to Mashable. The amount is reported to be $250 million. Photobucket was valued at $300 million by Lehman Brothers. Photobucket made $6.3 million in revenues last year according to ValleyWag. The company is reported to make $25 million+ in revenue this year.

Photobucket has 41 million users and received $10.5 million in funding last year from Trinity Ventures.

What does this mean for other widget ad networks? Andrew Chen, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures e-mailed me his perspective.

[Additional coverage: TechCrunch, TechMeMe]

Alex Welch, the CEO and Co-Founder of Photobucket announced that their videos will now be reappearing on MySpace once again. Earlier this month, I wrote about the videos being taken down because Photobucket was supposedly violating MySpace’s terms of service. People were concerned whether Photobucket would have as many hits without MySpace’s backing.

Photobucket has 40 million users and close to 2.8 billion images uploaded so far. MySpace receives over 90 million visitors every month.

“Following discussions with MySpace, we’re pleased to announce that all Photobucket videos and remixes are enabled once more on MySpace with immediate effect. Both our companies are committed to putting our users first,” wrote Welch on the Photobucket blog. “Moving forward, we’ve established open lines of communication and procedures with MySpace to prevent a sudden block of Photobucket content in future. We want our users to be able to share their content and understand it must be within the framework of MySpace’s Terms of Service for it to appear on the site.”

This is great news for Photobucket and MySpace. MySpace users enjoy having Photobucket widgets.

Around 10:30PM on April 10, MySpace started to remove Photobucket videos and slideshows.  YouTube videos are still embeddable.  The reason was because Photobucket violated MySpace terms of services.

After that questions were asked whether Photobucket would survive without MySpace.  Photobucket’s 40 million members.  Earlier this afternoon, I read an interesting article by LeeAnn Prescott, a Research Director at HitWise.

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… 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, slide shows, 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?

Photobucket has just announced that they have boosted sharing functionality for images, slideshows, and videos.  Photobucket added a new icon as well:

Now it is easy to export photos to e-mails and import them into Facebook, Xanga, Blogger, Friendster, Piczo, and Tagged.  There are tutorials available online on how to do this specifically.  You can also share slide shows as well.

Here is a sample of the new sharing interface:

There are also new styles of slideshows such as Hip-Hop, R&B, FlyBY, and Hearts.  There are now over 30 styles for Photobucket slideshows.

Laura M. was the 30 millionth registered user of Photobucket, the website that promotes the sharing and publishing of images and videos and embedding them into MySpace, eBay, Xanga, Friendster, LiveJournal, and Neopets.

According to Nielsen/Netratings, Photobucket was the fastest growing website of 2005. Over 65,000 users are signing up for Photobucket per day and over 50 billion images are being downloaded per month.

Photobucket offers 1GB of free storage and offers 10GB of bandwidth. For $25/year, Photobucket offers 5GB of storage with unlimited bandwidth. One of Photobucket’s best known products is their slideshow service:

The founders of Photobucket are Alex Welch and Darren Crystal. Both Alex and Darren have spent three years creating Photobucket. Prior to creating Photobucket, Alex and Darren worked together at Level 3 Communications. Alex graduated from Colorado State University and Darren graduated from the University of Texas-Austin.

Sources:
Photobucket Blog and Monkey Bites