These are my notes from the session on Success Story: PhotoBucket.
PhotoBucket is a video and image hosting site that sees 7 million photos and 30,000 videos uploaded daily. They serve over 3 billion pieces of media a day. The site has 15 million unique users in the U.S. (20 million worldwide) and has 80,000 new accounts created daily. There is now a staff of 55 people whose job it is to moderate content submissions to ensure they meet their guidelines.
The top sites their images used to be linked from used to be eBay and LiveJournal but now the key drivers of traffic are now social networking sites such as MySpace and Xanga. There is 30% - 40% overlap between their user base and social network website users
There was some general advise about widgets such as being careful about hosting costs which may pile up quick if your widgets become popular and also about trying to monetize users via your widgets because some sites frown upon that behavior such as eBay. However well designed and compelling widgets can drive a lot of traffic back to your site, the best example of this to date being YouTube.
The speaker then gave a timeline of notable occurences in the MySpace widgets world such as MySpace blocking Revver & YouTube to the recent explosion of new widgets in the past few months from MeeboMe to a number photo slideshow widgets from the major image hosting services.
Pete Cashmore over at Mashable.com has compiled some statistics on the most popular widgets on MySpace which shows the relative popularity of PhotoBucket's widgets in comparison to other services.
So what's in a name? They've renamed the feature from BucketFeatures to Widgets and now to 'Slide Shows' because none of their non-Silicon Valley users knew what widgets were. After the rename from 'Widgets' to 'Slide Shows', the usage of the feature almost doubled within a month.
They've also designed a JWidget which allows people to log-in to their PhotoBucket account to access their videos and images. Users can upload images and videos . This way people can outsource both image upload and content moderation to PhotoBucket. Now have 16,000,000 logins a month via JWidget from about 500 partner sites. It is amed JWidget because the developer's name begins with 'J'. :)
During the Q&A someone asked if they support you have tagging & open APIs. The response wa sthat they don't do tagging and their user base has never asked for tagging. With 2500 support tickets a day, none of them have ever been about tagging. Also, since it is just image hosting service, tagging is probably more appropriate for the blog post or profile the image is appearing in than on the hosted image. They don't have an No API primarily due to resource constraints, there are only 40 people at the company working on it.