On Wednesday, April 11, MySpace blocked videos and slideshows hosted by Photobucket from appearing on the site due to an apparent violation of the MySpace terms of Service agreement. Did this blockage have any effect on Photobucket’s traffic, and how much traffic do the two sites share?
The market share of visits to Photobucket was up 3.9% on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 versus an average of the previous 4 Wednesdays. As I wrote last week, Photobucket received 57% of its upstream traffic from MySpace in March 2007. The table below shows the Photography sites in MySpace’s downstream in March 2007, and Photobucket accounted for 73% of Photography category visits leaving MySpace (1.60/2.19) Photobucket is by far the most dominant photo website for MySpace users. (Note: this data counts actual visits to the photo websites, not views of the websites’ hosted content within MySpace.)

In looking at the video sites in MySpace’s downstream, as shown in the table below, we see that MySpace is managing to keep many of those users on its own site – at MySpace Video, which accounted for 64% (2.22/3.48) of MySpace’s downstream traffic to the top video sites in March. YouTube accounted for 31% of MySpace’s downstream video visits. In this case, MySpace has opted to host videos itself, and thus keep users within its own network while they upload content. (Note: this data counts actual visits to the video websites, not views of the websites’ hosted content within MySpace.)