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Interview with Markham Bennett of SmugMug.com

Interview with Markham Bennett, of SmugMug.com
by Anthony Cohn, People Search News

DreamDates.com

PSN: What exactly is SmugMug?

MB: SmugMug is an online service to upload and store all your priceless photos. We provide tools to manage and organize huge file sizes easily within an internet browser, but most importantly we want customers to show them off to friends/family/customers in big beautiful style with no annoying ads.

PSN: How much does your service cost?

MB: We offer 3 account levels with annual subscriptions. Standard is $39.95/year. Power is $59.95/year. Professional is $149.95/year.

PSN: How many members does SmugMug currently have?

MB: We have almost 100,000 paying subscribers.

PSN: What sets SmugMug apart from other photo sharing web sites?

MB: There are many points, but I will only cover a few. SmugMug offers the most beautiful way to show off someone's most priceless asset. We don't surround your photos by ads and we allow you to set up full screen slide shows or other viewing styles. When you browse through photos in our default "smugmug" style, you can easily click on the thumbnails and watch the photo change without refreshing the page each time. We also allow people to customize their site with either our own pre-made themes or they can design one of their own.

SmugMug offers white glove email customer support around the clock, on weekends and holidays. We are fanatical about making sure people know how to use the internet, how to upload a photo, how to share photos. We are there for our customers when they need us most. When someone receives a quick and friendly email response from a real person, it never fails to get a response back saying, "Wow, I didn't expect to hear from anyone for a day or two let alone a real person!"

SmugMug offers with every account unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. We give complete control over the privacy and security of your photos. Whether you want to be found on Google or whether you want to be your own private site, we meet the needs of all types of photographers. We want to be the "Fort Knox for photos". We store multiple copies of your original high-res images in multiple data centers.

PSN: Describe SmugIslands...

MB: SmugIslands are essentially settings that allow you to dictate who will and who will not find your SmugMug site. We need to meet the needs of various levels of photographers. The extremes are, photographer that wants their name *everywhere* on the internet contrasted by the photographer that wants to show their photos to only friends and family. We provide the tools and settings to allow any customer to pick and choose how they will be found. The first setting relates to public search engines, Google, Yahoo and the second setting relates to how they will be found on SmugMug's own search engine.

PSN: On SmugMug, what object or event seems to be photographed the most?

MB: Weddings seem to be our largest category.

PSN: Any suggestions for someone who is creating his or her first online photo gallery?

MB: Suggestion, please use SmugMug!! You will be impressed and your friends and family will love looking at your photos. Second suggestion, if you have any questions, no matter how silly, email us at help@smugmug.com

PSN: Where do you see the popularity of photo sharing web sites in the next ten years?

MB: We are already in at least the second big "photo sharing" phase. The first phase was littered with big prestigious brands (Microsoft, Adobe, Canon, Sony etc) rolling out free photo sharing sites and then shutting down and deleting photos with very little notice. Photo sharing sites will continue to grow in popularity as long as digital cameras and phones keep growing and improving sites to host those digital files will too. We see a few divisions between free photo sharing focused on selling prints & gifts, subscription photo sharing focused on the viewing experience and straight photo selling sites. I imagine will continue to see these lines blurred a lot more in the future. At SmugMug we never thought prints & gifts would be so important to our business but it is now critical to our business.

PSN: Any new additions or changes to SmugMug in the near future?

MB: SmugMug has huge improvements planned. With web-based software we are releasing enhancements every couple weeks. That being said, we want to keep our new functionality fairly quiet so our users get Christmas all year around :)

PSN: Where can someone go to get more information on SmugMug or create their own online photo gallery?

MB: www.smugmug.com

Aug 02, 2007

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