Webshots

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The new Webshots logo

Webshots is a large free online photo sharing site owned by American Greetings.

1 History
2 Membership
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

Webshots was created in 1995 by Auralis, Inc. in San Diego, California. It was initially a sports oriented screen saver sold at retail for PCs. Founders Andew Laakmann, Nick Wilder, and Narendra Rocherolle gradually migrated the desktop software to the Web and became one of the earliest instances of photo sharing found online. The Webshots Community launched in 1999 as an early social network and very quickly the largest public image directory on the Web.

In October 1999, Webshots was sold to Excite@Home for $82.5 million dollars in stock. The service continued to grow and when Excite@Home declared bankruptcy at the end of 2001, the Webshots assets were purchased back by the founders for $2.5 million dollars in cash.

In 2004, Webshots was the second largest private Web media property (behind weather.com) in the U.S. and was sold to CNET Networks for $71 million in cash.^[1]

On October 25, 2007, CNET announced that it had sold Webshots to American Greetings for $45 million in cash.^[2] Webshots joined the American Greetings Interactive unit and was reunited with another former Excite@Home property -- Blue Mountain.

Today, members can upload photos and videos from their digital cameras and organize, share, and back them up online. User-generated content is organized into dozens of different categories and sub-categories (eg: vacations, news, family, entertainment, fishing, Alabama, etc.), and specific searches can narrow results.

Since its start, it has grown to one of the largest photo sharing communities on the Internet; as of January 2008, there were more than 558 million photos and videos on the site. Most of the photos are searchable by any user, dependent on the keywords associated with each photo, such as the caption provided by the uploader.

[edit] Membership

The site is supported by advertising. Users can become "Premium Members" for an annual fee which allows them to view the site without ads and also to upload a larger number of images to their own galleries. All members get a free homepage where they can share up to 1,000+ photos publicly with friends, family, and anyone who comes across it. Webshots Premium allows for 5,000+ photos, and 500 more are added to one's capacity each month (feature chart of membership plans). The site offers an automatic notification feature that tells users when their favorite members have added new photos. Members also have the option to share their photos privately.