We've got big news: Fotolog, Inc. has been acquired by Hi-Media Group, a French company with a number of businesses in countries around the world, including online publishing and community, online advertising and electronic payment services.
For 5 years Fotolog has been the little engine that could. With a tiny team and small resources we've managed to attract a huge, dedicated community that has made Fotolog one of the 20 most-trafficked sites in the world (according to Alexa). We've also grown like crazy internationally, something we never expected but are extremely proud of. It's been a wild ride from the early days in 2002 when Scott Heiferman and I started Fotolog as a small project and ran it out of my apartment in New York City.
As the Fotolog community gets bigger and bigger, it only gets more and more important to ensure that the company has everything it needs to keep going and growing. We also want to get better at meeting the needs of our increasingly global member base (after a couple of years of astounding growth in South America, Europe has really taken off in the past year!).
As you can probably imagine, many companies have expressed an interest in acquiring Fotolog but it wasn't until we met with Hi-Media that we felt like we had found a partner that had everything we were looking for:
- Hi-Media is really good at things that Fotolog wanted help with: including selling relevant ads and providing easy payment options for people outside the US
- They have interesting community and publishing tools that we might be able to use to improve Fotolog (check out <A HREF="http://www.blogorama.fr/" TARGET=_top>http://www.blogorama.fr/</A> and <A HREF="http://www.jeuxvideo.com/" TARGET=_top>http://www.jeuxvideo.com/</A>)
- They respect the Fotolog site and community and want to grow it
- They have the resources to commit to doing the things we need and want to do to make Fotolog better and to building out the infrastructure needed for Fotolog to grow
- They understand the nuances of running a global business with presence in countries around the world that are really different from each other
At this point you're probably wondering how will this affect the Fotolog site. We want to reassure you that:
- Fotolog will still be free
- The core Fotolog team is staying on board and will continue working on the projects we've got lined up
- Pretty soon we should be able to integrate Hi-Media's Allopass service to make it easier for people around the world to pay for Gold Camera (but once again: Fotolog will still be free)
- And, as I mentioned above, you may even see some fun new publishing features that we might not have been able to build on our own
But the fundamental Fotolog experience will continue to be what it has always been.
As for me, I will continue to be the Chief Product Guy at Fotolog and I'll also be working with the product teams at all of the Hi-Media sites to share what we've learned about communities and content sharing while working on Fotolog. I'm very proud to have gotten Fotolog to the point where we're able to BOTH give our investors the return they deserved for supporting Fotolog along the way AND to ensure Fotolog's ongoing robustness by teaming up with a partner who is totally committed to continuing to grow the community.
So allow me to congratulate the Fotolog team for a phenomenal accomplishment and to welcome our new family from France (and Sweden and Germany and Brazil and...) We are really looking forward to accomplishing great things together. And to the Fotolog community: thanks for being part of this journey and we're looking forward to seeing more and more of your daily photos in the years to come.
Adam Seifer (/cypher)
Co-Founder and Chief Product Guy
PRESS RELEASE: <A HREF="http://info.fotolog.com/press_release?date=20070827" TARGET=_top>http://info.fotolog.com/press_release?date=20070827</A>
=====
Este texto en español está en los primeros comentarios del libro de visitas.
On August 27 2007
Edit
