Tech Shout!

MySpace has hit a preliminary deal for an amount between $200 million to $300 million, to buy photo-sharing website Photobucket.

However, the deal is yet tentative, and could not materialize, the source familiar with the deal has cautioned.

Apart from MySpace, Photobucket is popular on sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, eBay, Craigslist, Blogger and Xanga.

Palo Alto, California-based Photobucket provides users with free, online tools for multimedia expression that include photos, videos, and digital slideshows. Those building websites too opt for Photobucket for images to adorn their sites.

Photobucket, a four-year old establishment co-founded by telecom engineers - Alex Welch and Darren Crystal sometime around the dot-com bust, has reportedly done pretty well for itself, with around 41 million registered users and now hosts about 2.8 billion images on its site.

Currently, Photobucket weighs in as the 22nd most visited website overall in the U.S., according to Hitwise, with 58.78 percent of Photobucket’s traffic coming from MySpace.com and MySpace Mail. Today, it commands nearly 40 percent of the US online photo market, this being four times more than second-ranking Yahoo!

While Photobucket’s growth can be credited to users who link to its photos from around 300,000 Internet sites, nearly 60 percent of the website’s traffic comes from users leaving MySpace properties, according to Hitwise click data.

Hitwise stated, “Photobucket accounted for 73 percent of Photography category visits leaving MySpace and Photobucket is by far the most dominant photo website for MySpace users.”

Though the final financial details are in talks, all the same, MySpace has agreed to pay $250 million for Photobucket, plus as much as $50 million more if certain performance targets are met.

A few days back, both the sites were in news when their dispute over photo-sharing had been resolved.