$300million worth of picture hosting

by Chris Dawson

This post was written in May 2007; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

One of the most commonly asked questions on the eBay community boards is how can I host my own pictures instead of paying eBay fees. The answer almost always quick to be given is use Photobucket. Photobucket is the YouTube of pictures, but has caught the eye of MySpace who have just acquired the site for some $300 million.

eBayers who use the photo hosting service in their auctions should be reassured that the Photobucket blog insists it’ll be business as usual and the site will continue to run as a seperate entity.

Tags for this post: , , , ,
Author: Chris Dawson
Posted at: Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Filed Under Uncategorized
 

Comments

3 Responses to “$300million worth of picture hosting”

  1. Biggles on May 30th, 2007 5:57 pm

    I really fail to see why people cannot take advantage of a cheap web hosting company. The cheapest I know offhand is pennies a day and there is probably cheaper than that out there. Then there are those using a domain for email, but do not use the “free” associated web space to hold their images for ebay or an ebay clone.

    I like the total control over my images, I choose the size/format etc. I design my ebay listings and I dont have to have other companies riding like parasites on my ebay listings.

    Logstats if you have them, can show odd traffic from bandwidth/image thieves - admittedly that wont reveal those who copy then host your image elsewhere.

    If you can use a digital camera and know what windows explorer is, then hosting your own images on your own webspace is easy. Use a free file transfer program like FileZilla and treat your webspace like another set of folders. The minimum you need to know is one line of html code to put in your listings.

    Note I left out the image dimensions. I am sure you’ll figure out why ;)

    /ramble

  2. Biggles on May 30th, 2007 6:00 pm

    oops..

    img src=”http://yourwebspace/imagename.jpg”

    With the >

  3. Eddie on May 31st, 2007 5:33 am

    What have MySpace bought - a heavily monetised business or a massive user base ?

    I say the latter, which will be monetised in some way ?

    Given that most PhotoBucket users have free accounts, I suggest their main revenue currently derives from ad placement, and very much doubt if that revenue covers the massive overhead costs PB have/require to serve up and store a massive 3 billion images (2,935,600,000) !

    It will be interesting to see how this develops.

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