photobucket

Digg has announced that tonight they will be adding photos to the categories of "diggable" items. This is certainly in reply to our post from February of this year asking Kevin Rose for an images section. The post received 8215 diggs! Thanks Kevin for listening to the CN readers.

It looks like from now on when you submit a story, it will just be a generic category submission and then the media type will be automatically presented to you by Digg. Any images on the story will be offered up for individual submission. Seems like a good way for Digg to raise their counts and impressions. Just keep expanding the topics on Digg is a great way to keep increasing the available ad impressions. And since we know that Google loves Digg, they should get instant ranking across the board.

Now for the Photobucket partnership - looks very similar to the WSJ partnership from last week. Digg buttons will be added to Photobucket pages, a top Digg photos will be added on both sites. That's the net result from the Photobucket blog posting. I would think Flickr would have been the better choice for the Digg audience.

It will be interesting to watch if the mainstream Internet cares and/or participates in Digg. I can't imagine the general reader of the WSJ or user of Photobucket submitting and digging stories and photos.

Well dangit, the year of the acquisition is continuing. Valleywag is reporting that MySpace is in the process of acquiring Photobucket. I agree with Matthew when he says, "Photobucket accounts for more than 70 percent of MySpace’s photo traffic, according to Hitwise. In other words, it has pretty much the same relationship to MySpace as PayPal had to eBay way back when." Matt believes this has a 80 percent chance of going through.

Pete provides a quick overview of Photobucket, "Launched in 2003, Photobucket receives 17m unique visitors per month - a massive number, except that the majority of traffic was being referred by MySpace (despite constant denials from the company)."

This deal makes sense for MySpace - why let someone else monetize and capitalize on their traffic when they can bring it in house. Check out our previous Photobucket coverage. This scenario will play out over and over within the next 12 months. I will bet that we will see at least 8 more deals like this one in 2007.

Photobucket has announced a partnership with Freewebs today. This relationship involves Photobucket's JWidget partner program along with Freeweb's soon-to-be released Remote Publishing API. Freeweb's API will allow users to post content directly to their Freewebs accounts from Photobucket.

"This is just the first step in what's going to be a strong partnership," said Freewebs' President Shervin Pishevar. "Our 14 million members expect unprecedented ease of use from Freewebs to create multimedia sites and blogs. Photobucket's partnership and deployment of its JWidget allows members access to extensive libraries of still images and videos -- from their own albums and from publicly available content on Photobucket."

"The online, engaged, and creative youth that are core to Photobucket's customer base want simple tools for self expression, and easy ways to share their content with their communities," said Alex Welch, CEO of Photobucket. "Freewebs is a great partner destination for that."

Side note... Photobucket "lifted" my entire article from AlwaysOn including my pictures without even a link back to CN. Blah.

Here are the videos from the Engaging Contagious Behavior Workshop at AlwaysOn. Check the transcript as well.

AlwaysOn is holding a workshop about how to engage contagious behavior. The panel includes Jay Adelson, Digg CEO, Jeremy Stoppleman, Yelp CEO and Alex Welch, CEO Photobucket. I am going to do my best to do audio and video recording. Come inside for live text comments as well.