Embedded videos from Photobucket vanished from MySpace profiles as the two companies spar over digital content for the second time this year.
Photobucket, MySpace Fighting Again
Woosh! Gone.
Millions of MySpace profiles displaying videos loaded from Photobucket have some gaps on their pages. The chest-thumping that happened a couple of months ago between the two sites has escalated.
The Photobucket blog posted the breaking news last night. They ripped MySpace for the move:
MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.
The commodity isn’t the user so much as it probably is the video. We recently cited how Photobucket holds some 41 percent of the image-sharing space. That’s largely due to its popularity with MySpace users.
It’s a situation that the corporate masters at Fox Interactive Media would likely prefer to see remedied by MySpace users uploading to MySpace Videos instead. Om Malik suggested that a rumored Photobucket sale just got tougher, with a reputed $300 million price tag in jeopardy.
If that’s the kind of value third-party delivery of videos on what Mike Arrington thinks could be one out of every two page views, it’s little wonder Rupert Murdoch and his FIMinions would rather keep that cash in-house.
