> Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize

IIRC Photobucket actually made a good amount of money through their advertising business unit ("Give free storage and get paid by ads" was their business model). They were acquired successfully by Fox for $300M in 2007.

Ontela was a photo-uploading app provider in the pre-iPhone era. When Fox decided to spin out Photobucket (as a fallout of the MySpace debacle), the two companies got merged.