Have you ever looked at your Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) Flickr account and thought, "Why am I doing this? I can just throw my pics up on Facebook"? If this has crossed your mind, you're not alone. In fact, many photo-sharing sites - Snapfish (NYSE: HPQ), Photobucket, Picasa (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Shutterfly, as well as Flickr - are asking the same questions. With the development and enhancement of photo management capabilities in major social networking websites, niche players need to find new ways to stay relevant.

The situation is still far from grim. Fed by traffic from their behemoth owners, the photo-sharing sites remain substantial forces, and they are currently home to more than 20 billion pictures. There's still plenty of interest in these environments ... which has been bolstered by specific features that make the likes of Flickr attractive to both professional photographers and amateur shooters. The ability to order prints and personalize portfolios, for example, still provides an edge over sites like Facebook and MySpace (NYSE: NEWS).

Nonetheless, the threats from the social networking space are quite real.

Continue reading Photo Sharing vs Social Media: Who Wins?

Photo Sharing vs Social Media: Who Wins? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Fox Interactive Media, the internet arm of News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), is reorganizing due to a shortfall in revenue. According to TechCrunch, "The company, under President Peter Levinsohn, will miss their revenue target of $1 billion for the current fiscal year ending June." The miss could be as much as $100 million. Several of the top sales and marketing people at the unit will be moved or replaced.

The news indicates how hard it is to make money on social networks like News Corp's MySpace and photo-sharing property Photobucket. Unlike portal sites, social networks are a patchwork of content created by users and are hard to break into content categories like financial, autos, or music the way that advertisers like to target their messages.

The revenue miss also begs the question of whether the other large social network, Facebook, is worth anywhere near the $15 billion valuation it was given recently in a round of fund-raising.

Social networks may simply be good for users but awful for marketers.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

News Corp. (NWS): Trouble in MySpace-ville originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Newscorp pulls trigger on Photobucket purchase originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 31 May 2007 12:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

MySpace makes room for Photobucket originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 08 May 2007 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

News Corp (NYSE: NWS) Interactive is close to finishing a deal to buy online photo-sharing site Photobucket for about $300 million. Photobucket is one of the largest properties on the internet with over 14.7 million unique visitors a month, according to NetRatings.

After the purchase of social network MySpace, News Corp went from an also-ran online to one of the largest internet networks. The company also has sites for its news organization and studio. Photobucket makes that footprint much bigger.

Photobucket supplies many of the photos loaded onto MySpace. As a matter of fact, it would appear that the two sites have a large number of unique visitors in common, which could have pushed the value of Photobucket's audience down a bit during the bidding. Duplicate audience is not usually worth as much as visitors who are completely unique. But, Photobucket is also a large video sharing site, so News Corp picks up a competitor to YouTube.

The large questions raised by the purchase is where companies like Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Eastman Kodak Co. (NYSE: EK) were? Yahoo! has an online photo business, but with the company's problems it would seem that adding to that strategic part of its business would have made sense. Meanwhile, Kodak is struggling to move to a digital photo market. It has an online photo-sharing site, but picking up one of the largest sites in the industry might have helped the company with its turnaround.

It seems that Mr. Murdoch and the management at Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) are the only buyers with any stones.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

News Corp expands online with Photobucket purchase originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 08 May 2007 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Bloggingstockcast: our one year anniversary, Simpsons roller coaster, buy your friend a drink, Suze Orman's Caribbean finance cruise of debt, and more

Bloggingstockcast: our one year anniversary, Simpsons roller coaster, buy your friend a drink, Suze Orman's Caribbean finance cruise of debt, and more originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

MySpace and Photobucket hookup again originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

MySpace puts Photobucket in the penalty box originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) figures it is not in enough businesses already, so it plans to offer a high-definition photo [subscription required] format to the world's camera industry. The old standard, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression format, has been around awhile and may not be able to break down photos into small files as well as Microsoft can.

The move by MSFT is not unlike the one that it made into the video world five years ago. It offered its Windows Media video compression in place of the old MPEG-2 standard for breaking down video files for transmission.

Moving photos around the internet is a big business. Companies like PhotoBucket and Flickr would not exist if photos could not be broken down digitally and sent over IP. The Microsoft product offers the opportunity to do this with less bandwidth usage than the JPEG format.

There is a lot at stake. Research firm NPD Group said that digital camera sales hit $6.9 billion in 2006. The new software could be a blessing for that industry.

Microsoft does not want money for the new technology; it is part of Vista. The world's largest software company thinks this might drive consumers to adopt Vista faster. It may be right.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Microsoft wants to take your picture originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Rupert Murdoch: never drawn, never beaten. Not in the newspaper industry, cable programming, satellite TV, studios, and now, the Internet.

Murdoch looks as old as Methuselah and probably is, but his News Corp. (NYSE:NWS) purchase of MySpace has taken his Internet division, called Fox Interactive, out to a page view lead over the previous leader, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO). ComScore says that Fox Interactive had 39.5 billion page views in November. Yahoo! had 38.7 billion.

Yahoo! kept the lead in unique visitors at 129.9 million compared to 119.7 million for Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) sites which were in second place. It hardly matters. Yahoo! 's margin in page views and unique visitors has disappeared.

Yahoo! has recently announced a major restructuring of its management, but it does not address why the Internet portal has not had success in expanding its audience in video sharing and online community sites through acquisitions or home-grown products.

YouTube shows up in the ranking with 25.5 million unique visitors. Its new parent, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), has 108.3 million. Facebook, a community site Yahoo! approached about acquiring hit 16.7 million unique visitors in November, and independent photo sharing site Photobucket hit 15.6 million. Yahoo! is already in the photo sharing business with its Flickr brand.

Douglas A. McInyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Another reason to sell Yahoo!: Fox Interactive originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

PhotoBucket, the huge online photo sharing site, is not for sale. But of course its CEO decided to have a press interview to make that clear.

In September, PhotoBucket was the 41st most visited site in the US. It had 14.7 million unique visitors, putting it ahead of sites like Overstock and Craigslist. The company is independent and backed by venture capitalists who are probably hungry for the kind of quick return that MySpace and YouTube VCs got.

By talking to the press and signaling that PhotoBucket could be had for the right price, the company is probably starting a bidding war. With photo-sharing and online photo development as two key community and commercial functions on the web, there are several potential suitors.

One would have to be Kodak, which needs one "Hail Mary" pass to get itself back into the game. Its digital businesses have not been able to replace the drop in its photo paper unit, and the company is viewed by many on Wall St. as a failure. The company's EasyShare online store is already a presence in the photo-sharing world, but does not have anywhere near PhotoBucket's reach. With a market cap of $6.5 billion, Kodak would have to offer a lot of the company to be a bidder.

Yahoo!, which is already in the online photo business with Flickr, would use the reach that PhotoBucket offers. It also might signal that Yahoo! management will not simply keep its head in the sand while Google, News Corp, and other companies work the M&A circuit to try to get ahead.

The other logical buyer is AOL. Richard Parsons, the chief of AOL parent Time Warner, has said that he will not overpay for online properties, but the audience at AOL websites is still largely flat and lagging behind the growth of rivals. PhotoBucket might help transform that.

Head over to Las Vegas. The odds are 8-to-1 in favor of PhotoBucket being bought this year.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Who Will Buy PhotoBucket: It's Not For Sale originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 20 Oct 2006 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.