MySpace To Acquire Photobucket For $250 Million

MySpace, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (NYSE:NWSA - news), has reached a preliminary deal to acquire Photobucket, the world's top photo-sharing site, for around $250 million in cash, a source familiar with the deal said on Monday.

Photobucket functions like a kind of Swiss bank for depositing and transmitting photos, helping Web users post their photos on other social networking sites, instead of trying to keep the users locked up on its own site.

Besides MySpace, Photobucket is popular on sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, eBay, Craigslist, Blogger and Xanga.

While hardly known outside the youthful world of social network sites, Photobucket has become wildly popular with users for providing free, online storage tools for multimedia self-expression, from photos to videos to digital slideshows. Site builders turn to it for images to decorate their sites.

The four-year-old startup, based in Palo Alto, California, has signed up 41 million registered users, up from 32 million at the end of last year and 2 million in 2004. It now hosts nearly 2.8 billion images on the site.

Spokesmen for Photobucket and MySpace were not available to comment on the deal.
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