14 DAY TRIAL // Photobucket, an online photo sharing service, will be acquired soon by the Fox Interactive Media, a large company that owns several famous names such as MySpace. The deal was rumored a long time ago but the two firms needed the approval of the Federal Trade Commission in order to finalize the transaction. According to Reuters, News Corporation, the media conglomerate that owns Fox, plans to include Photobucket into its services and bring a different perspective to the products already offered by the giant.
"Officials have completed their investigation of the deal without taking any action to block it, the Federal Trade Commission said in a notice issued on Tuesday. The purchase is part of News Corp.'s. plan to bolster its Internet businesses. Photobucket lets its more than 42 million users upload photos and videos, which can be pasted on their own Web sites, blogs and social networks like MySpace," Reuters reported today.
As you might know, Photobucket is regarded as the most powerful competitor for Yahoo's Flickr, a similar service that allows users to upload photos and share them to other Internet users. Recently, the Sunnyvale company announced the closure of Yahoo Photos, a product with almost the same functions that was quite abandoned by numerous users for a migration to Flickr.
The interesting fact about this acquisition is that it somehow affects Google although the Mountain View company has always avoided to get involved into online photo sharing services. However, Photobucket also enables users to upload videos so a major improvement over this side of the product might get YouTube into trouble and affect its traffic.
A long time ago, News Corporation said that it wanted to develop a YouTube-like product and target the same category of users. It's not quite clear if Photobucket is the video product meant to challenge YouTube but anything is possible since it has the potential to catch the Internet users' attention.