Facebook has announced that it’ll embed video ads in your “feed” (an interesting word for media kibble if there ever was one). Is this the beginning of the finish for Facebook? There used to be a website call Webshots. A long time before Picasa and Facebook, you could publish photos to the website and have them hosted free of charge in “albums” with captions. By 2001 Webshots became a profitable company with a combination of revenue streams that included advertising, premium service, and merchandising.
71 million in cash. Quite simply, for its time, it was a fairly big offer. 71 Million seems quite paltry compared to what today’s websites are available for. But then back, it was a major player on the web. Webshots is forgotten about. What occurred to it? Well, to begin with, offering free services on the Internet is tricky. You can’t make money on “free” unless it offers some concealed charges. Many sites start out as “Free” and then discover that they aren’t making any money – or not making just as much as they think they should be.
- Brainstorm with friends and family, associates
- 411674 was converted in 1963 from tourist sleeper 6247
- Telephone charges
- Forget USP. Determine your Usage Cases
- REGULAR EXPRESSIONS can be used on CHAR, CLOB, and VARCHAR2 datatypes? (True or False)
- Mobile Support
So they try different ways to “enhance revenues” and almost all of these end up screwing the pooch – eliminating off the root website. Webshots offered a “premium” service for a nominal fee. Not surprisingly, the few bits on that tidbit. Who wants to hand over credit cards amount and pay a few dollars per month for that which was previously free?
Then they tried advertising. Pop-ups, sidebars, banner advertisements – you name it. Problem is – or was – back then, the only people who would purchase such ads were (but still are, for the most part) con artists. Various dubious sites appealing you bargains or even to get you out of debt, would pay for advertising on Webshots – and Facebook, as well. These advertisements didn’t generate a lot of revenue, as few clicked on the odious offers offered.
And of course, associating yourself with con-men and rip-off performers is no real way to enhance the trustworthiness of your site. They tried to offer t-shirts and mugs with your pictures to them then. A lot of sites, like Zazzle, do this, and I even ordered a few (from Webshots and Zazzle) with mixed results. If you are running a photo hosting site, selling the photos seems such as a natural. But today, few folks pay for paper photos any longer (everything is on the ubiquitous smartphone) and the coffee-mug and t-shirt printing places are pretty competitively costed.
They attempted reformatting all your photos to a proprietary format – and then making you pay to download your own photos. That appeared to backfire, as they returned to standard JPEGS promptly. Finally, they devote video advertisements in the sidebar. And it was obnoxious. To begin with, it supposed the web pages became very sluggish to load – and every time you clicked on “next picture” the video ad (or a new one) would start again, at full quantity. You discovered quickly to “mute” your audio speakers on your PC, lest you be blasted with a full-volume advertisement for God-knows-what.