Michael Arrington writes over on TechCrunch about the disparity in price vs supposed value for YouTube and Photobucket at the time of their acquisitions by Google and MySpace, respectively.
I think the thing he failed to really directly address is the “hype factor” and the name-brand recognition that YouTube has/had versus Photobucket. Due to the copyright infringement cases, the controversial and/or wildly popular videos that have made it onto the site, phenomena such as lonelygirl15, etc, etc. YouTube had that name-brand recognition going for it. For instance, my grandmother (whom I love dearly, Luddite or not 
) does not even have an internet connection and hardly ever turns on her computer, however she knows what YouTube is and has a general idea of how it functions, I seriously doubt she has ever heard of Photobucket.
At the time of their acquisition YouTube benefited from being a site that was wildly popular and growing quickly with the added eye-catcher steeped in a nice little dose of controversy. While Photobucket may actually numerically be a more valuable acquisition, in my opinion it just doesn’t currently have that zing behind its name that inspire multi-billion dollar bids.
That being said, Photobucket does have a lot going for it – though I personally use Viddler and flickr for video and photos, respectively. So I think that MySpace did get a good deal with their purchase price of the site – should be interesting to see what they do with the site though – MySpace’s excessive ad placement tends to vex me extremely.
