Fotolog, the photo-sharing site that's popular in Latin America, announced today that they've raised $4 million in third round funding BV Capital and 3i - the total raised is now $12 million. With only 4 million users joining over a period of 4 years, it looks like Fotolog is seeing slow but constant growth. Compare that to Photobucket and ImageShack, which are younger than Fotolog and many times the size. However, 3.7 million of those users joined over the past 20 months, suggesting that they're picking up the pace.
One of the reasons for this slower growth is that Fotolog actually limited the number of signups in the past: their infrastructure just couldn't handle the traffic. When I reviewed the site in August, they were still limiting the number of signups to 20,000 free members per country per day. According to ComScore, they now generate 9.7 million unique visitors per month and 4.9 billion monthly page views.
But just like Orkut, Fotolog is one of those social networks that accidentally became popular with a certain demographic: despite being based in New York, the majority of Fotolog users come from Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Mexico. Technically speaking, it's not great, but it seems that users go wherever their friends are - hopefully the money will be spent on managing that growth better, and bringing the site up to par.
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