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Webshots
built 622 days ago
Webshots was letting users upload and share photos back in 1999, long before Flickr became the photo sharing icon of the Web 2.0 era. Webshots’ corporate history serves as a Silicon Valley history lesson in itself. Riding the wave of the .COM boom, Webshots was aquired by Excite@Home for for $80 million. Once the bubble burst and Excite went bankrupt, Webshots’ founders reacquired the company for pennies. As Web 2.0 gained steam, it was sold again to CNET for $70 million. Finally, it was sold to American Greetings for just $45 million, as numerous competitors like Flickr, Photobucket, and Facebook began dominating the photo sharing market.
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Webshots is a very large property, with about 40 million total users and 300 million photos. CNET as a whole, by the way, is still growing at a healthy rate - they had an average of 116 million unique monthly visitors in Q4 last year, which was up 13% from the same period in 2004. Average daily page views increased to 103 million, up 22 % from 2004. CNET says they want to be the Viacom of the online space with a number of standalone properties addressing different market. Along with Webshots, recent acquisitions of dating site Consumating and food site Chowhound show this strategy in action. Webshots is another (very large) property helping them achieve this goal.
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To Bisquitzoe: Oh come on. CNET having purchased Webshots (a looong time ago, btw) has _nothing_ to do with the technical difficulties Webshots has been having since the new design went live. It has _everything_ to do with the huge technical undertaking it is to change _everything_ on a site that hosts over 400 million photos and was built on a very antiquated software platform (remember, Webshots has been around since the mid-1990s and hadn't had a significant upgrade since). Not to mention the hardware issues that they've been working on for over a year to bring the servers up to an appropriate level for a service to survive in the competitive 2006 landscape.
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Webshots ... announced some upcoming features today. These include customizable homepages (hopefully with the ability to edit the html, ala MySpace layouts) and the ability to search photos by date. But by far the most interesting revelation is that they’re launching a video offering, allowing users to upload videos and share them with friends and family. Presumably the product will follow the lead set by YouTube, MySpace Video, Xanga Videos and Metacafe, allowing users to syndicate their videos on other social sites. If so, this makes a lot of sense - Photobucket’s new video product has performed very well. And as one of the biggest players in the photo-hosting space, I’m surprised that ImageShack aren’t giving the idea serious consideration.
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Webshots is ... announcing today a new program called Project Spotlight, which it calls an artist grant for scripted, documentary and citizen journalism video on the web. Webshots will begin compiling a best-of show combining the best video and photography on its site. This could prove compelling; see for example all the traction online contest site Bix gained by giving out awards up to $50,000 to users before being acquired by Yahoo! last week. Many independent video bloggers are looking for ways to be compensated for their work.
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A chart mapping the traffic patterns from both sites (courtesy of Alexa.com) is quite instructive, in that Webshots has been going steadily downward in terms of “daily reach” while Flickr has been going steadily upwards. Flickr is about to pass Webshots, and the site hasn’t even been in existence for two years.
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