Online digital photo sharing is big business
Richard Waters Forget movies on the internet, downloadable music and online video games. The hottest thing on the World Wide Web right now is you.
To be more precise, it is the collected outpourings from your digital life: the instant messages, amateur blogs and up-loaded family snapshots that are starting to fill out your virtual persona.
Trivial ephemera, perhaps. But to internet colossi such as Yahoo! and Google these are fast becoming the stuff of big business and for advertisers who are searching for ways to turn the online medium to their advantage, it could represent a new way to reach an elusive audience that is moving beyond the TV.
The flurry of deal-making that has overtaken the new online pastime of photo-sharing is a case in point.
Loading your personal snaps on to the servers of an internet service and letting families, friends or complete strangers browse through them is not a new idea: a spate of websites were launched at the peak of the dotcom boom to do just this. Digital photography is only now becoming a popular pastime, however, producing the long-awaited lift-off in use.
The global number of unique visitors to Webshots, for instance, has climbed from 14m a month in the middle of last year to 23m now, as the number of pictures posted on the sitehas more than tripled to 180m.
Where the online audience has moved, big business has been quick to follow. Virtually all of the most popular photo-sharing sites have now been snapped up by corporate giants: Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo! were the latest to join the rush last month (see chart.)
For companies like Kodak and HP, the move into digital picture-sharing is a hedge against the threat the web poses to their traditional businesses. If consumers no longer go to a store to have their pictures produced but use their home printers instead, selling prints off the internet - one of the ways the photo-sharing sites pay their way - may take up the slack.
Others, though, see this as the latest way to build an internet media empire.
As more people flock to show off their personal snaps, says Martin Green, who runs the site, a new mass audience is being built. “It's about self-expression and public sharing,” he says. “It's become a social media business.”
Online photographs are only one part of this new “me-centric” internet media phenomenon. It also includes new pastimes, like blogging - the practice of maintaining a web journal that now claims more than 8m adherents in the US alone, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project - and older internet habits like sending instant messages and email.
By linking all of these activities more closely together, the internet giants now hope to consolidate their hold on the mass online audience and create a new advertising vehicle.
Take the latest efforts of MSN, Microsoft's internet service. While it has dabbled in the past with making its own internet “content” and trying to find new ways to entertain its audience, it has come to realise that its main attraction for users is more basic: to “connect people with information and with other people”, says Blake Irving, who runs communications services at MSN.
That means, in short, turning email, instant messaging and search into the basic pillars of a new media concern. “People spend more time communicating than they do searching,” says Mr Irving. “We thought we were just building a communications network, but advertisers told us we were building an audience.”
Selling advertising linked to instant messages is not new, and the amount of advertising revenue from MSN's messaging service has doubled over the last year, says Mr Irving. The aim, though, is to connect the 155m monthly users of the service - what Mr Irving calls MSN's “greatest asset” - to other tools that can sustain and extent their digital identity.
This week, MSN formally launched a version of its messaging services that links to a new photo-sharing and blogging site called MSN Spaces: when you message your friends, why not include an automatic notification that alerts them that there are new photos or personal ruminations on your blog?
The other internet media giants are moving in the same direction. Yahoo last week launched Yahoo 360, a sought of all-purpose online identity kit that combines photo-sharing and blogging with personal communications and other tools. Google, which has bought both a leading photo-sharing site and a blogging service in the past year, has also promised to give users more tools to manage their online personalities.
在网上“出版”您的相册
忘了那些可以从互联网上下载的电影、音乐和在线游戏吧。眼下万维网上最热门的是你自己。
说得更准确些，这是你的数字生活留下的点点痕迹。即时信息、业余博客和上传的家庭相片，它们开始充实你的虚拟形象。
这些东西也许微不足道。但是对互联网巨擎雅虎(Yahoo!)和Google来说，它们正迅速成为大生意。对那些有意利用网上传播媒介的广告客户而言，这也许代表了一种新的方法，使他们能接近网络时代不可捉摸的受众群体。
相片共享这一新潮网上消遣领域交易频繁，就很说明问题。
把你的个人相片挂到互联网的服务器上，让家人、朋友或是陌生的人浏览它们，已经不是什么新鲜主意了。在网络业高潮时期，有一大批网站就是因此建立起来的。但是，数码相片刚开始成为大众化消遣，由此带来人们期待已久的用量激增。
举例来说，随着贴在Webshots网站上的相片数量增长三倍以上，达到1亿8000万，该网站的全球访问人数也从去年年中的每月1400万上升到目前的2300万。
网上受众转到哪里，大企业就会尾随而至。大企业已经将几乎所有最受欢迎的图片共享网站收入囊中：惠普(Hewlett-Packard)和雅虎于上个月成为这场竞赛的最新选手。
对柯达(Kodak)和惠普这样的公司而言，网络对其传统业务造成威胁，进入数字图片共享领域是对冲这种威胁的方法。如果顾客不再到店里冲印，而是用家里的打印机制作相片的话，在网上提供打印服务(这是图片共享网站维持生计的一种方式)有望弥补业务量。
不过，其它公司将此视为建立互联网媒体帝国的最新途径。
运作这个网站的马丁?格林(Martin Green)表示，越来越多的人们争先恐后展示自己的相片，一个新的受众群体正被建立。“这是关于自我表现和集体分享，”他说，“它成为一项社会传媒事业。”
在线相片只是这种“以自我为中心”的新互联网传播现象的一部分。它还包括了一些新的消遣，比如博客这种自办网络刊物的方式。据Pew互联网与美国生活项目称，在美国就有800万个博客。此外，还有一些历史较久的互联网生活传统，比如发送即时消息和电子邮件。
现在，互联网巨头们希望把这些网络行为更加紧密地结合起来，使他们牢牢控制庞大的网络受众，打造出新型广告工具。
以微软公司(Microsoft) 的MSN互联网服务最近所作的努力为例，虽然它也曾经试图创造自己的互联网“内容”、寻找新途径以娱乐受众，但它终于意识到自己的主要吸引力更加基本，MSN的交流服务主管布莱克?额文(Blake Irving)表示，那就是“将人们与信息联系在一起，与其他人联系在一起”。
简而言之，那就意味着将电子邮件、即时信息和搜索引擎转变成为一种新传播媒介的几个基本支柱。“人们把更多的时间用于交流，而不是搜索，”额文先生表示：“我们以为只是建立一个新的交流网络，但是广告客户说，我们在建立一个受众群体。”
把即时信息与广告销售联系在一起也并非新意，额文先生表示，MSN信息服务带来的广告收益去年翻了一番；但是，真正的目的是将每月1.55亿用户(额文先生称之为MSN“最大资产”)与能够维持并延伸其虚拟身份的其它工具联系起来。
最近，MSN正式推出短信服务软件的最新版本。这个版本与一个称为MSN空间(MSN Spaces)网站相连接，在那上面不但可以分享图片，还可以当博客。如果你发送信息给朋友，为什么不带上一个自动功能，提醒他们在你的博客上，又有新的相片和个人随笔发表了？
其它的网络巨人也正朝着同样的方向努力。最近，雅虎推出了雅虎360，这是一种通用的网上身份工具包，包括图片共享、带个人交流的博客以及其它工具。Google在过去一年已经购买了一家领先的图片共享网站和一个博客服务网站。它承诺要为使用者提供更多工具，帮助他们管理自己的网上形象。
