I got an email a little while ago that the company that owns NetZero and Classmates.com (the almost 1960s sounding United Online--what, no Amalgamated?) is purchasing PhotoSite, a photo-sharing website, from Homestead Technologies. On the heels of the news that Yahoo bought Flickr and that HP purchased Snapfish, we now have what we in the journalism racket call a trend.
Frankly, I'm a little depressed. With the emergence of Flickr (and a far inferior PhotoSite, among others), I thought we'd moved away from the idea of photo-sharing as a secondary or tertiary feature in a portfolio of photo-related commerce. Photo sharing as loss leader or afterthought. I thought photo sharing, which had been revived as a business within the last year, was going to be another example of a dot-com boom era idea that failed only for poor execution, not because it wasn't sustainable as a business.
Fact is, we don't know the answer to that and maybe we never will. Rumor has it that the cofounding couple behind Flickr were exhausted from the startup grind and that's why they sold out. Homestead cashing out a division is a bit of a mystery to me at the moment. The price tag was $10 million in cash and a licensing deal. Chump change, in the scheme of things. Snapfish had already sold itself once, so what's one more time?
What this feels like is a return to the "build a feature, not a business" days of 1999 and early 2000, the same built to flip mentality that Jim Collins wrote about in Fast Company five years ago at the peak of the bubble. Read the Collins piece and tell me what you think. Has this latest resurgence in tech again fallen victim to a bout of the get-rich-quicks? What's the next exciting development in tech that will become a boring land grab for the Internet blue chips? Or is this picture not fully developed?
Related Stories: | Topics:Technology, internet + web, Flickr.com, Homestead Technologies Inc., Snapfish.com Corporation, Jim Collins, United Online Inc. |
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Recent Comments | 4 Total
March 29, 2005 at 2:02am by Christopher Rose
Flickr (nice site) was definitely built to flip. They grew fast by giving most accounts away free, an old storyline: Photopoint got a million customers and Zing about that many by giving photo sharing away free pre-bust.
But smugmug has a large, fanatical following and they claim to be profitable and built to last. Many people like their site better than Flickr's.
Now that we're back in a bubble let's hope they don't go for the quick buck so at least one good sharing site is standing after the next bust.
March 29, 2005 at 10:11am by Frank McClung
Thanks for the link on Jim Collin's article, built to flip. It is one of the best I've ever read. I'm seeing the same trend in the Real Estate market with flipping. It is hard to say we would choose differently when offered $10 million and a chance to retire for life after a start up phase. I'd like to think so.
March 29, 2005 at 10:38am by Eric Costelllo
The idea that Flickr was built to flip is, well, incorrect. Yesterday the same was suggested in this Barron's article, and I am not clear in either case where the idea came from. I have been working on Flickr since its inception; actually, since before it was even Flickr, when it was an MMOG called Game Neverending, and I can assure you that we built it to be profitable and to last.
Christopher's suggestion in the first comment above that the giving away of free accounts is evidence we built it to flip is kind of funny, considering how many complaints we get from people that our free accounts are too restrictive (to which we answer "buy a pro account." :)
April 16, 2005 at 6:28am by Antoine
I don't know the guys from Flickr, but I agree with Eric. Photo sharing is not the next dot com bubble thing. Online photo sharing is becoming the next killer application as messenger applications are today. Of course, Flickr isn't profitable yet, but many users have registered, so it should come quickly.