photobucket

Sector: image and video hosting

Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA

Management: co-founders Alex Welch and Darren Crystal

Funding: Angel funding last year, not looking at the moment for more funding. According to Peter Pham, director of business development, photobucket is a profitable cash flow business.

Secret Sauce: photobucket says it has the largest number of users, bigger than flickr and YouTube = the total number adds up to more than 15 million. The company also reports that two million new users a month sign up for the service. They attribute this large number to “ease of use and reliability.” Conent is moderated = no porn (almost, it’s hard to keep track of more than 1 billion images.) Company plans to employ 30 people in Iowa (which some say is “practically India”) to moderate the content. Business model is ads and premium subscription ($25/year for 5 gigs of storage) and image printing (paper, tshirts, posters and mini-books).
Seen and Heard: According to calculations based on overall Internet traffic in the US, photobucket funnels two percent of that traffic. Uploading 4 million images and 30,000 videos a day. Impressively, 60 percent of all MySpace profiles have at least one piece of photobucket content! (That number was confirmed by Jason Whitt of Vantage Point ventures). CNNMoney writes: “Another company, PhotoBucket, is making a name for itself by allowing people to upload photos and videos and copy links to the videos to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.”

photobucket

Sector: image and video hosting

Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA

Management: co-founders Alex Welch and Darren Crystal

Funding: Angel funding last year, not looking at the moment for more funding. According to Peter Pham, director of business development, photobucket is a profitable cash flow business.

Secret Sauce: photobucket says it has the largest number of users, bigger than flickr and YouTube = the total number adds up to more than 15 million. The company also reports that two million new users a month sign up for the service. They attribute this large number to “ease of use and reliability.” Conent is moderated = no porn (almost, it’s hard to keep track of more than 1 billion images.) Company plans to employ 30 people in Iowa (which some say is “practically India”) to moderate the content. Business model is ads and premium subscription ($25/year for 5 gigs of storage) and image printing (paper, tshirts, posters and mini-books).
Seen and Heard: According to calculations based on overall Internet traffic in the US, photobucket funnels two percent of that traffic. Uploading 4 million images and 30,000 videos a day. Impressively, 60 percent of all MySpace profiles have at least one piece of photobucket content! (That number was confirmed by Jason Whitt of Vantage Point ventures). CNNMoney writes: “Another company, PhotoBucket, is making a name for itself by allowing people to upload photos and videos and copy links to the videos to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.”