Webshots – Don’t blink

Webshots () provides a stage where members are able to upload, share and download personal pictures and videos in albums in a variety of topics and to print out their pictures on different products. “Webshots calls itself the world’s largest photo sharing network with more than 32 million members, who have downloaded 5 billion photos off the site.” Founded in 1999, Webshots’ initial business was to sell a floppy disk of skiing and white water screen savers in retail stores. Catching the wave of the dotcom bubble, it was acquired by Excite@Home with $80 million and Webshots’ founders reacquired the company back as soon as the bubble burst and Excite went bankrupt. As the Web 2.0 era came, it was sold again to CNET with $70 million and finally, to American Greetings with just $45 million.

Business objectives and business model

1. Exchange type

The E-commerce business of Webshots is B2C. Webshots provides a platform where individual consumers can download photos and purchase products with photos printed on them.

2. Presence

Webshots’ business processes occur both online and offline. It offers services in terms of “Pure play” and “Partial play” at the same time. For downloading digital photos, either free or charged, transactions have no physical fulfilment. For purchasing, the delivery, however, is fulfilled offline. Resembling the Amazon’s model, Webshots allows its users to choose the photos or products they are interested in, add them into the personal shopping carts, create the orders, provide delivery details and online payment information and finally submit the orders. Delivery will take a couple of days taking into consideration of production time and the distance of destinations.

3. Revenue

Webshots has three revenue models: advertising, subscription and mark-up. About 50 percent of its revenue is derived from advertising to support those free services. Webshots also offers ways that advertisers can get involved with sponsoring daily photos.

Users have options of a free or premium membership. The free accounts are limited to upload and share 1,000 personal photos plus 100 more in each month after registration of the membership. Videos shared are up to 5 minutes. The premium membership requires a subscription fee of $2.49 per month. And this premium membership allows users to share as many as 5,000 photo uploads with 500 more a month afterwards and 10 minutes’ videos. Subscription-paid customers also enjoy a photo sharing with no distraction of advertisements. Major differences of services between free and premium memberships are shown in Table 1:

 Table 1

Webshots considers its free download service as an excellent marketing tool as most people came to know Webshots when they are attracted by the high quality wallpapers and screensavers.

Service of photo printing and other merchandises is another source of its revenue. Pictures can be printed out on printing paper or on other items, such as mug, T-shirts, bookmarks or clipboards, according to the customers’ preference and to be sent to house. With a large prices range, users may choose stickers, as cheap as $4.95 or a messenger bag which costs $119.95. Free photo sharing is only a vehicle to acquire more users and its ultimate goal is to sell those prints.

4. Pricing

Webshots applies the menu pricing for its subscription fees and the products for sale. For the premium members, the subscription fee is $2.49. All the products have the fixed prices with only delivery charge varying from the distance of destinations.

5. Value added service

Apart from the prints order which other picture sharing websites or blogs don’t have, Webshots offers a downloadable software. The Webshots Desktop is a free photo and video management application that users can download and install on their computers. With this software, users are able to upload photos right from their desktops or from digital cameras, create slideshows, wallpapers with calendars, screensavers using their own photos, create and manage online albums and a list of favorite members. Families and friends will be able to download users’ photos and users can keep track of photos being downloaded and be notified automatically each time. “It is estimate that this application is downloaded 500,000 each week, with over 100 million downloads in total.”

Join now!

Users’ photos and albums can be set public or private. If they are public, anyone can look them up and see them. If they are private only the members selected from Webshots can see them, and interact with them. After uploading pictures, users can write captions on them and tag them to facilitate photo searching. Pictures are optional to be rotated or resized to users’ satisfaction after uploading. The photos can also be rearranged by album or within an album into the order as the users want.

People access to albums and pictures can interact with them. “They ...

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