Murdoch Buys Another Web 2.0 Site
It seems that Rupert Murdoch can’t get enough of Web 2.0. First he bought MySpace. And now, via MySpace, he has bought the photo & video sharing site Photobucket. The site may not be that familiar to many in the UK, but in the US it is more popular than Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo! & has a much larger share of the UK market.
The deal is rumoured to be in the region of $250 million to $300 million. Many have pointed out that when you compare this to the price which Google paid for YouTube, it seems like a very good deal. You would also assume that a man as astute as Rupert Murdoch (who would almost certainly have been in the loop on a deal of this size) wouldn’t pay that much for a company if there were any risk that it would face the same sort of legal problems which have beset YouTube.
Whether this will come to be seen as being as good business as the MySpace purchase has proved, time will only tell. What is for sure is that when Mr Murdoch gets this involved in a sector, in this case Web 2.0, there must be gold in them thar hills.
