Webshots

» see webshots.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

webshots started in september 1995 in san diego as a sports-themed screensaver you bought at retail. by 1999 the four founders had pulled it onto the web and turned it into one of the first photo-sharing communities online. the desktop client was the actual hook: it pulled rotating photo wallpapers down from the site every day, so your windows machine cycled through new images you did not have to upload yourself. that was novel in 1999. it stopped being novel after flickr.

the company changed hands six times across seventeen years. excite@home bought webshots for $82.5 million in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com bubble. the founders bought it back for $2.5 million two years later when excite@home went bankrupt. cnet networks acquired it for $71 million in 2004 before passing it to american greetings for $45 million in 2007. a small company called threefold photos picked up the remains in october 2012 and shut down the photo-sharing service on december 1 of the same year, keeping only the screensaver download.

the user base never recovered from the flickr-and-then-facebook compression of the photo-sharing market. webshots had 14 million monthly visitors at the cnet peak in 2004, with more than 200,000 paid subscribers. by 2012 facebook held more new photo uploads in a day than webshots did in a year.

i remember webshots as a screensaver that came preinstalled on a pc i used at an internet cafe in ankara around 2003. the rotating wallpaper of waterfalls and mountain ranges was already a stock-photo aesthetic by then. nobody i knew uploaded their own photos to webshots; the english-language community side never really came over to tr. the screensaver part was the part that traveled.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

the early product was a "channel" model. you picked categories you liked and the screensaver downloaded fresh images in those buckets each day. that part of the company predated the social web entirely. it shipped on cd-rom, then via dial-up download. the photo-upload community was bolted on later, after the founders saw the early photo-blog wave forming.

~ the cracks ~

flickr launched in 2004 and immediately took the part of the audience that cared about photographers. facebook photos launched in 2005 and took the part that just wanted to share with friends. webshots sat in the middle without a clear identity, still half a screensaver download property and half a community site. cnet bought it as a media-traffic asset rather than a community to invest in. american greetings bought it for the same reason and then could not figure out what to do with the upload side.

~ what it became ~

threefold's wallpaper service still runs at smithsonian-photo-of-the-day energy. it is no longer a place where people store their own photos; that whole class of activity moved to facebook and then to phone-camera-roll cloud sync. the only piece of webshots still alive is the original feature: a rotating desktop background pulled from somebody else's curated catalog. the part of the company that everyone valued at $200 million in acquisitions is the part that died.

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