Search Engine Journal

In a bold and questionable move, Fox Interactive has banned the use of Photobucket videos within MySpace profiles. Photobucket images and slideshows are still available, but videos are not being served.

Photobucket made this announcement in reaction to the ban on the Photobucket Blog:

This action by MySpace means that all of the videos and remixes you created will no longer show up on your MySpace profile and comments section. More specifically, if you attempt to add new videos or remixes to your profile, they will be removed.

We are not happy about this and we’re pretty sure you’re not happy either. We appreciate that you have invested hundreds of thousands of hours using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. In particular, you’ve all been really embracing videos at Photobucket — to the tune of 50,000 video uploads a day, which is great. Rest assured that your content is being kept safe in your Photobucket album even though it may disappear from your MySpace pages.

We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media. 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.

MySpace of course has their own video upload technology and is a partner with Google and YouTube.

Once Google integrates Video Ads into all major YouTube and MySpace embedded videos, the distribution of that content should grow immensely.

Currently, Photobucket is not mixing advertising into their videos, but perhaps by cutting the very popular video competitor out of the equation now, MySpace and Google are eliminating a future parasitic revenue angle for Photobucket.

Problem is, MySpace users love and are very loyal to Photobucket for various forms of uploading multi-media, and it will be intriguing to see if they make the switch over to MySpace video, or find another network which allows the embedding of Photobucket material.