The new owner, with its more limited resources, announced that free accounts would become limited to 1,000 images, regardless of file size, and ended the policy of keeping the Pro account fee at $25 per year for legacy Pro users. Less than a year later, Flickr was sold to SmugMug. In 2017, Verizon purchased Yahoo!, and reorganized it under the name Oath (now Verizon Media). In 2015, once Google Photos became independent of the infamous Google+ social network, Flickr quickly fell out of favor, despite a quick response with its Uploadr app. In 2014, Flickr launched an official iPad app. It only had one problem: everyone's friends were already on Instagram. While the price of an ad-free Pro account was doubled to $50 per year, the improvements helped make Flickr more popular than ever before. The new app arrived alongside an Android version, and a new plan of 1TB of storage for both Pro and free users in 2013. Yahoo! only launched an official Flickr app in late 2009, giving Facebook and potentially many others plenty of time to become the go-to choice for sharing photos among mobile users. Whether it was the result or the cause of Yahoo!'s indifference, Fake and Butterfield left the company in 2008. In June 2007, the iPhone was released, and companies such as Facebook quickly started working on mobile apps for their sites, which would become available to the public in 2008. While annoying the community isn't a recommended tactic, Flickr's real problem started later that same year. In January 2007, Yahoo! announced that all Flickr users would have to associate their accounts with Yahoo! accounts, which required them to provide more personal information to keep using Flickr. In 2007, Flickr was ranked as the 19th-largest site on the web by Alexa. Compared to the $1 billion that Facebook paid for Instagram in 2012 (to the amazement of many), it now looks ridiculous.Īt first, it looked like Yahoo!'s resources would help Flickr become one of the largest sites on the web: in 2006, the upload limit was raised to 100MB per month for free accounts, and lifted altogether for Pro accounts. Yahoo! purchased Ludicorp in 2005, for a sum estimated to be around $25 million. albums), the ability to list another user as a friend (or "family" for selective sharing), and the ability to embed photos in a "weblog."įlickr had two account types: free accounts, limited to 20MB of uploads per month, and Pro accounts, with up to 2GB of monthly uploads for $25 per year. The image hosting service became an instant hit for its effective use of features that are considered obvious today, such as tags, favorites, comments, groups, sets (i.e. Flickr was considered a pioneer of the Web 2.0 era, alongside the likes of MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube, whose content was generated mostly by their users.įlickr was launched in 2004, just like Facebook, by Ludicorp, founded by the married couple, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. User participation was usually limited to comments on news stories and online forums. In 2004, the most popular sites on the web were Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and other sites that offered news stories and indexes of recommended websites. What could Yahoo!, the site's former owner, have done so poorly in the years in between? How could Instagram have taken the lead so quickly after its launch in 2010? Is Flickr headed toward a virtual grave, or is it still a compelling service for some people? A decade later, in 2018, Flickr was sold to the relatively unknown company SmugMug. There was no Instagram or Unsplash around, and essentially that's what Flickr could have become. In 2007, Flickr was the most popular dedicated photo-sharing site on the web, and growing exponentially in terms of new images uploaded.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |