WebProNews

Did you know Photobucket controls 41 percent of photo-sharing market? Do you know why they do? Answer: MySpace, MySpace, MySpace. The News Corp.-owned social networking phenom is showing that if you really want market share, you have to win over MySpacers.

If MySpace Loves You, Everybody Loves You

Recently, it came to light that both YouTube and MSN Video owe an enormous slice of their success to MySpacers linking or embedding their videos. Now, as Hitwise's LeeAnn Prescott reports, over half of Photobucket's market share is due to its preference among MySpace users.

"Traffic to Photobucket has continued to grow along with MySpace and social networking - from March 2006 to March 2007 its market share of US visits increased by 113% and it captured 41% of visits to the Hitwise Entertainment - Photography category," writes Prescott at the Hitwise blog.

Yahoo! Photos is the nearest competitor, gathering just under six percent of the market, followed my Yahoo-owned Flickr, with 4.5 percent. Fourth place is Slide with 4.45 percent, followed by Kodak Gallery with 3.43 percent in fifth.

Slide may be an interesting one to watch. Not the typical photo-sharing web service, Slide lets users become visual storytellers (a hipper version of your Aunt Gertrude's mind-numbing vacation slide shows). But Slide gets over 70 percent of its traffic from MySpace, and has grown by more than 2000 percent in the past year.

Yes, 2000 percent.

So what are learning about online marketing here? Well, we know that if you want to be found, you turn to Google. But if you want to build buzz and loyalty, you turn to MySpace. The social network's impact on web-services that have become household names now is (dare I say it?) indisputable.

If you're developing a widget, a web app, a social network, a concept – whatever – then getting adopted by MySpace users should send you straight to the top. And once again, we're on, on to social marketing.