Webshots takes on Photobucket

Webshots today announced a free image hosting service called AllYouCanUpload.com, here's the full story from Yahoo! (since CNET News had not yet covered their own announcement!)

As far as I can figure, this is a way for Webshots to boost their comScore Media Metrix numbers. In a recent WSJ article Photobucket showed one year growth of 81% while Webshots was down -16%. Even though I have yet to figure out the business model around Photobucket's giving away free disk storage and bandwidth as a remote hoster though with 10 million unique users a month you should be able to figure out some way to make a buck. That is certainly what Trinity Ventures was thinking when they recently recently invested $10.5 million in Photobucket.

Traffic numbers and ranking are vitally important to CNET as they have built a major online advertising property around Webshots.

-MJK