Photobucket forges iPhone app, Ask partnership
Fox's photo-sharing service has an iPhone application, which isn't particularly newsworthy. Here's what is: it has teamed up with IAC's Ask.com for a search and advertising deal.
Looks like some big-media deal-making went into this one.
Photobucket, the photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has announced the launch of an iPhone application (download), just like everybody else.
Users can browse their Photobucket albums, as well as upload images from the iPhone to the service with a single click. The application costs $4.99.
But Photobucket had a more interesting announcement on Thursday, namely a multiyear partnership with Ask.com, the search engine owned by new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp.
Through the deal, Photobucket will use exclusively Ask.com search for its photo, video, and Web searches, and some of Ask.com's text and display ads will be shown on Photobucket. No financial specifics were mentioned.
"Photobucket has one of the largest online audiences, and now Ask.com provides these consumers with the answers to the questions they ask every day," said Andrew Moers, general manager of partnerships for Ask, the No. 4 player in search. "This alliance furthers our strategy to bring Ask.com to consumers worldwide through a broad range of Internet access points."
Photobucket sister company MySpace, meanwhile, has its search (and many of its ads) handled by Google. But on that note, Google has provided ad technology to Ask.com since the dinosaur days of 2004.