Fox Buys Two Media-Sharing Sites

Fox Interactive Media announced separate agreements to acquire two photo- and video-sharing sites, Photobucket and Flektor.

"The acquisition of these two companies is a perfect strategic fit for us that reinforces FIM's leadership in user-generated content," FIM president Peter Levinsohn said in a prepared statement.

Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

The News Corp. unit’s highest-profile acquisition to date is social-networking site MySpace, which it bought in 2005. FIM also owns IGN.com, FOXSports.com and AmericanIdol.com.

Photobucket, based in Denver with offices in Palo Alto, Calif., claims to have more than 42 million members. FIM said 47% of Photobucket users link to social networks such as MySpace.

FIM added that it will keep Photobucket as a stand-alone site while also integrating its technology and tools across other Fox Web properties.

Flektor, founded in 2006, provides Web-based multimedia-editing and publishing tools to create “mash-ups” and other types of user-generated media clips.