Photobucket Unveils "Stories" Feature for Creating Lasting Multimedia Narratives

Online, November 15, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Photobucket Corporation today announced the availability of "Photobucket Stories," providing users with an easy new way to combine photos and videos into complete, sharable narratives. Fresh on the heels of the rollout of the all-new beta Photobucket user experience, the site is seeing significant increases in user engagement as Stories helps to transform the act of photosharing into the art of storytelling.

During its initial beta period, the all-new Photobucket has seen continued growth with new registrations reaching one million new users, while time spent on the site is up two and a half times, per user, as compared with the existing site. Photobucket users are also active and engaged with the new Stories feature, generating more than 100,000 "Stories" created in the limited availability beta period.

"We've experienced tremendous growth and impressive user engagement levels as a result of our recent redesign," said Tom Munro, Photobucket's CEO. "Our mission has always been to help people preserve and protect their memories, but now we've been able to take that a step further and turn memories into meaningful, unique stories; the new features we've built into the all-new Photobucket allow users to do so much more with their photos and video than ever before."

Photobucket Stories allows users to easily create and collaborate on living stories by inviting friends and family to contribute photos, video and text to a single, sharable canvas. Once Stories are created, they are easily embeddable on blogs, personal, and brand sites, and can be shared among friends from mobile devices or across Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

"Building upon the success of the all-new Photobucket, we're excited to officially launch Photobucket Stories, which is now fully integrated into the user experience," said Kate Hare, vice president of product management, Photobucket. "We wanted to make it easy for everyone to collaborate and share their complete stories. Friends and family are a big part of our stories and they all have a unique perspective on an event, and Photobucket Stories lets everyone enjoy the fun of creating a story around the event."

Finally, there is a complete, collaborative and contextual way for creating and sharing your life's adventures, from the epic to the everyday. No longer are consumers confined to sharing images one at a time or in structured album formats; with Photobucket Stories, the larger narrative evolves with richer context and meaning. Stories allows users to:

• Create, curate and tell a complete story by combining photos, videos, text captions and comments
• Add to stories from mobile devices with direct upload from camera rolls in both Android and iPhone
• Share a story preview via Facebook Timeline, or directly invite Facebook friends to help contribute to a story
• Control privacy settings to share your story with a select group - or the world

"With the addition of Stories, Photobucket continues to deliver on our promise to be the one place for all your photos and videos so you can do everything you want with them," said Munro. "We've already taken the guesswork out of preserving and protecting your memories; but thanks to Stories, you can now add new context and meaning to your adventures, connecting with others in a more complete way than ever before."

To celebrate the launch of Stories, Photobucket is also announcing its "Life's An Adventure" contest, in which users are invited to chronicle and share their interesting exploits for the opportunity to win $25,000. Anyone can submit an entry in story form via Photobucket.com/StoryContest for consideration. Entries are now being accepted through December 9, and winners will be announced on December 14.

About Photobucket
Photobucket transforms the act of photosharing into the art of storytelling. As the world's leading consumer service dedicated to preserving and sharing the entire photo and video lifecycle, Photobucket hosts more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members, who upload more than four million images and videos per day from the Web and connected digital devices. Photobucket's headquarters are in Denver with regional offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.

For the latest feature announcements and news, please visit the Photobucket press blog at http://blog.photobucket.com/photobucket_press.

To create a free Photobucket account, users can visit http://photobucket.com, or find the Photobucket Mobile Application and Snapbucket app available in the app store on all major smartphone platforms. Photobucket supports Mobile Web, iPhone, Android based devices, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7.

MEDIA CONTACT:
PerkettPR for Photobucket
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