Facebook photos took over at universities. Flickr became very popular with bloggers. During this period, new photo sharing services began to emerge to service different markets. The company was sold to CNET Networks for $71 million in cash. In the same year, Alexa ranked Webshots the second largest English language privately held Web media property (behind ). By 2004, Webshots was grossing $15M/year, had more than 200,000 paid subscribers, and was the #1 photo sharing site and top 50 media property per ComScore. īy 2001 Webshots became a profitable company with a combination of revenue streams that included advertising, freemium service, and merchandising. The service continued to grow and when declared bankruptcy at the end of 2001, the Webshots assets were purchased back by the founders for $2.5 million in cash.
In October 1999, Webshots was sold to for $82.5 million in stock. The Webshots Community launched in 1999 as the first photo sharing website with an emphasis on public sharing. Founders Andrew Laakmann, Danna Laakmann, Nick Wilder, and Narendra Rocherolle migrated the desktop software to the Web and became one of the earliest instances of photo sharing found online. It was initially a sports oriented screen saver sold at retail for desktop computers. Webshots was created in 1995 by Auralis, Inc.
