MySpace Admits Photobucket Clips Once Again

A couple of weeks after MySpace said nein! to embedded videos originating on Photobucket, the News Corp-owned social networking site took down the barrier it had erected in retaliation for the inclusion of advertisements shown in the streams of Photobucket-based clips without the prior notification or consent Murdoch and his vast supply of underlings. Well, it’s anyone’s guess whether Murdoch himself was the one to throw a fit over the news about Photobucket’s ad invasion, but you get the idea.

So what happened behind closed doors that led to a peace offering (we don’t know who did the offering and who did the accepting) between the two companies? No one has mentioned anything on the matter just yet. But we can tell you that Photobucket enjoyed some growth in traffic in the two weeks that MySpace’s snub remained in effect. That’s proof positive that all PR is good PR. (Actually, that’s a crock, but when it can be said, it’s said.)

When all is said and done, both MySpace and Photobucket need one another. MySpace gets to give its users great access to the treasure trove of video clips hosted by Photobucket (one of the most utilized and under-recognized of the video hosts on the Web today), and Photobucket gets the views it needs to look important and valuable in potential buyers’ minds. There’s no reason to think Photobucket wouldn’t wish to see fate make it another YouTube, and with numbers in the billions flying around the digital ether on what seems like a daily basis, the site’s owners and operators would want only to put its best foot forward, so it is likely that the company with the videos made concessions to the company with the millions of people and the millions of video-hungry pages.

There’s really not much to learn from this two-week-long spat, other than to be extra careful what you say or do if you want to keep that for sale sign sparkling clean.