SmugMug gives Flickr new lease on Web life
CEO vows to revitalize photo-sharing service
SAN FRANCISCO – Is there a Flickr of hope for one of the Internet’s longneglected but beloved services?
A surprise acquisition by Smug-Mug, reported exclusively by USA TODAY late Friday, ended months of uncertainty for Flickr, whose fate had been up in the air since last year when owner Yahoo was bought by Verizon for $4.5 billion.
Don MacAskill told USA TODAY his independent, family-run photo-sharing and storage company, Smug Mug, is committed to breathing new life into the faded social networking pioneer, which hosted photos and lively interactions long before it became trendy. The news lit up social media. “I have watched the service’s long decline and neglect at the hands of Yahoo, and then its sale to the loathsome telco Verizon, with sorrow,” influential blogger Cory Doctorow wrote on website Boing Boing of Flickr. Now, he says, “there’s hope at the end of the tunnel.”
Some also see opportunity in the timing of the acquisition by Smug Mug.
The company, which offers a subscription rather than an advertising-driven business model, could help Flickr become a safe haven for consumers wary of sharing their data with large tech companies.
After revelations that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information pilfered by Cambridge Analytica, a British political firm with ties to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, consumers are having second thoughts about trading their data for a free service.
The majority of Flickr users have free accounts that run advertising alongside photos. Flickr also offers “Pro” subscriptions for $6 a month or $50 a year.
“I don’t know what the future holds. This is a new model for me,” MacAskill said. “We certainly think we need to operate it with an eye to our cash flow and our profitability. We are going to have to take a detailed look at the business and make sure it’s growing and healthy.”
The mostly free Flickr played a central role in the cultural and social life of the Internet. Friendships were forged on Flickr as people shared photographs and others commented on them.
Overshadowed in the smartphone era by the rise of Facebook and Instagram, Flickr suffered defections to rival services but held onto a core, loyal following despite product and policy misses and the hacks of Yahoo, as well as encroaching competition from Google and other massive photo services.
“Flickr is an amazing community, full of some of the world’s most passionate photographers. It’s a fantastic product and a beloved brand, supplying tens of billions of photos to hundreds of millions of people around the world,” MacAskill said. “Flickr has survived through thick and thin and is core to the entire fabric of the Internet.”
Founded in 2004 by Stewart Butterfield and his then-wife, Caterina Fake, Flickr was sold a year later to Yahoo for $35 million after the service gained a massive following.
Silicon Valley talked of the “Flickrization of Yahoo.” And Yahoo retired its photo service, Yahoo Photos, and made Flickr its flagship. But Flickr had to scrap for resources, delaying critical progress as smartphone photography exploded. Flickr’s mobile app launched in 2009, but it was slow and beset by bugs.
When Marissa Mayer took charge of Yahoo in 2012, Flickr users hoped it would finally get the attention it deserved. One user, photographer Sean Bonner, had a website — dearmarissamayer.com — to telegraph the message: “Please make Flickr awesome again.” But by the time it released improved mobile apps and began offering a terabyte of storage space for free, it was too late for Flickr to make up the ground it had ceded.
Traffic has shrunk from its heyday, but Flickr says it has more than 75 million registered photographers and more than 100 million unique users who post tens of billions of photos. In March, Flickr had 13.1 million unique visitors, up from 10.8 million a year earlier, research firm com Score said.