Yes, You are reading it right. Photobucket is the biggest site on the web. It has more than 38 million members and is growing with 80,000 new members every day. It is even bigger than MySpace or Facebook. A lot of people who use these 2 services might not know Photobucket. At the end of 2003, Photobucket had only 50,000 members. And now they are growing with more than that every day.
Photobucket is one of the most important sites on the internet. It has built an essential service that did not need to shout out for attention like MySpace, YouTube or Facebook.
You can share your personal media with the rest of the world trough Photobucket. The site is built on linking. You upload your media item there and link to it on whatever other site you wand, for example your blog or even MySpace. Large numbers of links go into Myspace, Facebok, Xanga, Friendster, Blogger and other such sites.
Photobucket is monetizing 17 million unique visitors per month. That is more than Facebook and half as many as YouTube (though far fewer than MySpace’s 64 million). Many people think Flickr with 7 million unique visitors per month is the biggest photo sharing site, but Photobucket is for sure. Photobucket is pushing 2.5 billion image out on the web each day.
The revenue for Photobucket is coming 80 % from ads. There are ads from eBay, Disney and other big companies. Photobucket also makes money from it pro service, which gives you the ability to store more and larger images.
Photobucket knows what’s on its site. It employs 80 people who scrutinize images to prohibit porn or illegal commercial content. While they’re looking, they also add so-called “tags” to the images to identify them. That will enable users to search for things by category, something that so far is very difficult elsewhere, even at Google. Photobucket plans to start pushing image search in the near future.