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Photo Blogging Lures VCs

March 28, 2005 BY Mark Evans

Nothing like a sweet acquisition – Yahoo's purchase of Flickr.com for about US$35-million last week – to bring the bees (VCs) to honey (photo bloggers). Fotolog, which bills itself as the “world's largest photo blogging community” has attracted US$2.4 million from BV Capital, whose investors include AOL Time-Warner, Stanford University and Mayfield Fund. To be honest, I haven't dabbled yet with photo blogging but it's not a phenomena I completely understand. I mean, it's one thing to share ideas (a.k.a. words/text) but photos of this and that? Is there anything compelling about photo blogs other than as personal diaries and artistic endeavors? I guess there must be otherwise the smart folks at BV Capital wouldn't have written a check. When the deal for Flickr.com was announced last week, I wondered why Yahoo decided to buy Flickr.com rather than Fotolog. Maybe it had to do with valuation or willingness by the founder-entrepreneurs to sell out. Any thoughts?

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  • Roland Tanglao

    have you ever actually used flickr for posting a non trivial number of photos?
    if you honestly try it out and post some decent public photos you will see what the fuss is all about.
    Ciao!
    ..Roland

  • Anonymous

    I had the same thing to say about this as Roland when I was reading this from bloglines (and couldn't see the comments). They chose flickr because of the penetration this site has into this vertical. The features and functionality that it has and the popularity of it would be why they would have chosen it. Currently I would say it's the Hotmail of photo-sharing. Take out an account and give it a whirl! :)