MySpace parent to buy 2 multimedia companies, including Photobucket

NEW YORK — The parent of MySpace is buying the media-sharing site Photobucket for about $300 million, bringing together two of the Internet's most popular hangouts.

The deal announced Wednesday will give MySpace and sister sites under News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media access to Photobucket Inc.'s photo and video technologies, while Photobucket gets Fox's resources to accelerate development of its tools.

Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive, said Photobucket also would be able to incorporate advanced slideshow generators and other editing tools from Flektor Inc., which Fox also announced Wednesday it bought.

"Together, they represent a powerful combination and we are thrilled for them to join our network," Levinsohn said.

Financial terms of the two deals were not disclosed. But three people familiar with the Photobucket deal, citing anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the price, said Fox was paying about $300 million for Photobucket, about half of the $580 million News Corp. paid in 2005 to buy MySpace.

The Photobucket deal comes just weeks after a public spat in which MySpace partially blocked content from Photobucket. It was announced the same day CBS Corp. said it purchased global online social network Last.fm for $280 million in cash in a move to attract younger viewers and listeners across its businesses.

MySpace offers a mix of messaging tools to encourage its youth-oriented visitors to expand their circles of friends. Central to the site are personal profile pages where users can post photos and video clips, blast messages to friends and have visitors leave comments.

MySpace users often embed material from outside sites like Photobucket and Google Inc.'s YouTube, both of which make that easy by providing the programming code to cut and paste into MySpace profile pages.

The practice has made Photobucket one of the leading sites on the Internet, even though relatively few access content directly through its home page.

Under the deal, Photobucket would remain a standalone operation within Fox, and users of rival social-networking sites such as Facebook could continue to incorporate Photobucket content in their profiles. For now, Photobucket will continue to offer basic services for free, with a fee for more storage and other features.