Is Photobucket the next Internet darling?
Executives at the photo-sharing site Photobucket are fond of saying their company has one of the most visited Web sites that nobody has ever heard of. Photobucket’s 17 million U.S. monthly visitors make it the 34th most-visited site on the Web, according to ComScore Networks. Among the top social-networking or content-sharing destinations, Photobucket’s traffic only trails MySpace and YouTube and is slightly ahead of Facebook, according to ComScore figures. And the number of people storing images on Photobucket far exceeds that of higher-profile rival, Flickr. Yet Photobucket, which developed technology that allows users to post photos on blogs, Web sites and MySpace pages, is the only site among that group, other than Facebook, that hasn’t been acquired. Critics say there’s a good reason for that: despite the site’s large audience, they aren’t convinced the 4-year-old Photobucket is either a trendsetter or a potential cash cow worth coughing up big dollars to purchase. Moreover, they
