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 Andrew Laakmann, Danna 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.[2]
On October 25, 2007, CNET announced that it had sold Webshots to American Greetings for $45 million in cash.[3] 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.
In August 2008, Webshots changed the sharing model for its members' photos: only the owner of the account and other accounts explicitly marked as 'friends' by the account holder can directly download (by right-clicking) the full-size photo from the album. All other users, including paid members, are shown the image resized to the dimensions of the browser window and within an Adobe Flash Player applet, to increase the difficulty of copying the photo. Account holders do not currently have the option to turn off this feature globally or on individual photos.
[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.
[edit] Malware
Unbeknownst to its users, Webshots employed its Webshots Desktop Application (a free program that users can download from their site to manage their online pictures[4]) to install the Kiwee Toolbar as part of a software update for this program[5]. Once infiltrated in the user's computer, this piece of malware cannot be removed by regular means.[6][7] Kiwee toolbar is potentially dangerous because it may install additional malware onto the compromised computer and collect user-identifying information possibly resulting in privacy violations and identity theft. The site was classified as EMD (sites engaged in malware distribution)[8] by hpHosts, a community dedicated to protect Internet users against access to ad, tracking and malicious websites[9].
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