and Sony's, for instance, have considerable muscle behind them, while can rely on marketing support from District Photo, one of the biggest mail-order film processors. ''So instead of dad pulling out his wallet for pictures, you can do it all electronically,'' Jeff Stoddard, director of Yahoo Photos, said.Įven so, the smaller competitors have some advantages. Late last year, Yahoo began a service that allows users to view their photos on wireless phones. Webshots has faced increasingly stiff competition from Yahoo, which has in recent months rolled out a number of new features to enable users to share their photos more easily and decreased the number of places where advertisements appear. Bonnie said: ''That's a lot of additional ad inventory for us.'' With Webshots visitors viewing 20 million pages daily, Mr.

Shelby Bonnie, chairman and chief executive of CNET Networks, said most of the Webshots audience had not yet visited CNET's sites, which include, MP3.com and, among others. The latest deal is another sign that good ideas that were simply premature during the dot-com boom are winning favor now that the Internet economy is strengthening. In 1999, bought it for $82.5 million in stock, only to sell it back to the three co-founders in early 2002 for $2.4 million. This is actually the second time that Webshots' owners have sold the company. (Several Webshots employees scan the site for inappropriate content.) ''So if you want to go on vacation, you can find very detailed photos that you wouldn't see at other travel Web sites,'' Mr. The site's 14 million users have posted more than 60 million photos for others to see. Unlike some other sites, Webshots allows users to post their albums publicly, for others to download if they wish. From there, users create albums, then e-mail invitations for others to look. Webshots, like several other photo-sharing sites, lets consumers upload their digital photos to a Web page on the site, free of charge. CNET said it expected overall revenues for Webshots to grow by at least a third next year. Webshots said it was profitable and expected to generate $12 million to $13 million in revenue this year, half from advertising and the remainder from selling premium online services and photo prints. Narendra Rocherolle, co-chief executive of Webshots, said one reason Webshots chose CNET over other suitors was that it could help the company reach more well-known advertisers, because it already has long-term relationships with advertisers like Canon and Sony. Executives said those audience sizes are enticing enough for marketers to open their checkbooks.

Webshots photos