What happened to Flickr? Is it chopped liver now? I guess being bought by Yahoo means that Flickr is now subsumed into the larger Yahoo Photo, is thus no longer a startup company, so doesn't get the press attention anymore. Photobucket is fine if you just want a place to host your photos for your blog, but it doesn't have tags and clusters of interesting photos. Flickr is nearly the same as Photobucket in that you cannot currently purchase prints of your photos, but has a lot of cool tools for exploring other folks' photos, like for instance, the Oversize pool:
Anything which is outrageously big. The starting image should give you an idea. This is a piece of fun. Images of tall or obese people or body parts will be deleted, as will photos that are not of large objects
or a million other similar quirky groups. Folks keep inviting me to join these interesting groups, but I don't have enough photo love to spread around.
WSJ.com - Smile, You're on Photobucket A year ago, relatively few people had heard of Photobucket.com. While the upstart Web site is still far from a household name, it has emerged as the most popular online photo destination in recent months, drawing more visitors than established sites from companies like Eastman Kodak Co. and Yahoo Inc.
Photobucket.com Inc., started by a photo buff who wanted a better way to share images with his friends, has seen traffic surge tenfold in the past year. In August, it had 12.2 million unique visitors, compared with 9.6 million at Yahoo Photos and 5.9 million at Kodak EasyShare Gallery, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings.
The company's meteoric rise offers some insight into the changing world of digital photography. Photobucket1 doesn't sell prints. Instead, it provides so-called “image hosting” by wooing Web users who are less interested in printing copies of photos and more interested in showing them off on their blogs and social-networking Web pages. But like many young Internet companies Photobucket faces stiff competition and is looking for a way to turn its popularity into dollars.
“It's a very neat idea. I'm just trying to figure out what their business model is,” said Gary Pageau, a spokesman for the Photo Marketing Association International, a trade group for film processors and retailers.
Virtual Middleman
Photo sites from Kodak, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard Co. use a hybrid approach to making money on the Web: Hook users by letting them upload their latest digital photos to the Web and share them for free, then charge around 15 cents for prints. Sites like Yahoo Photos2 and H-P's Snapfish3 say their typical customer is a parent looking for ways to share snapshots from, say, the family trip to Disney World.
Photobucket said it is targeting a younger audience, including teenagers looking to dress up their blogs. Blogging sites like LiveJournal and Xanga don't allow users to upload photos to their blog entries unless they pay up to $4 a month for premium services. Meanwhile, at the popular social-networking site MySpace.com, users are given enough room to store about a dozen photos.
