photobucket Archive

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.

Part 1

Part 2

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.

Panel workshop now completed. Comments below from the panel. If there is an interest, I can post audio and video from the session.

Moderator: What is the definition of contagious behaviour? 

Jay – engaging consumers is contagious.

Alex – i think of external and internal for contagious behavior. Includes the team – we grew from 1 to 60 pretty quick and how do you gt the culture to come together as a team. And the outbound part with listening to your consumers.

Esther – teaching users how to take control. Esther starts right out by shilling her company.

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Moderator: how do you deal with tools?

Jay: for us it is a lot of trial and error. we know some tools only work with 1-15% of our audience. the first step you have to go thru is understanding your audience really well  – and then design the tools and ui for them. as for what to create – that depends on the vision and philsophy. it is first that core understanding. the way we are doing segmenting now is we create features that apply to the broad range and then watch the reaction. thats a slow process.

Jeremy: we look at it from 3 segments – users finding businesses, businesses, and users who actively post on the message boards. when we develop features we decide which ones they go to.

Alex: don't overlook the obvious.

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Moderator: what about the notion of failure?

Jay: We fail a lot. I feel close to this issue. If you are not failing, then you are not trying enough things. We try experimenting. You have to look at features and tools you develop and be willing to accept what it is telling you. "if we wait longer, it will succeed" it is a way that many silicon valley mantra.

Esther: Keep making new mistakes.

Jeremy: the data rarely lies. We love to experiment. if it is flatlined from the day we put it out there, then we know it wont work.

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User: share a personal horror story:

Alex: all of mine are hardware failures.

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User: how do you make sure that the next big thing doesnt take your contagious behavior?

Jay: I want to be something that helps with the next contagious behaviour. We want to help with everyone's contagious behavior.

Esther: it is important to be generous. Have a sense of something. Sites need a personality.

Jeremy: it's about network effects. look at flickr – it's where people go.

Alex: it was about taking a good idea and making it better. we did something similar at photobucket. we solved a simple problem and got momentum and built from that.

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User: contaigious behavior is mostly anonymous. whats the balance as you want to know everything you can about them.

Jay: there is a difference btw profiling and identity.

Jeremy: you have to get creative.

Esther: Let the user know what you know about them. And let them change it if it is not right.

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User: what are the biggest mistakes being made today?

Alex: don't follow the fads

Esther: deliver on the expectations you set.

Moderator: when it sucks, say it sucks.

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I thought this session was pretty good. It felt very light on the subject, could have gone much deeper, but 45 minutes including open forum questions is probably not enough time to go deep. After the session ended, many of the attendees flocked to the front to speak with the panelists. Seemed Jay and Esther had the longest lines. I could see a full day workshop about this topic at a future event.