Flickr Eats Yahoo! Photos (Not The Other Way Round)
Yahoo! is
set to announce that it will close its online photosharing website Yahoo! Photos in favor of Flickr, the web 2.0 darling that it purchased two years
ago. According to web metrics firm Hitwise, Yahoo! Photos is currently the number 2 photo
website on the web, behind Photobucket, which has seized 40% of the market on the back of
strong usage among MySpace visitors. Over 50% of Photobucket's traffic comes from
MySpace, compared to around 3% for Yahoo! Photos.
Flickr, meanwhile, has gained on Yahoo!'s main photo property, jumping from the #6 photo website last year, to the #3 position today. According to Charlene Li of Forrester Research, the move is a no-brainer.
Because Flickr has tools that allow users to embed metadata -- tags, EXIF info, etc. -- directly into photos, Flickr images tend to be easier for photo search engines to index, says Li. Yahoo! had no choice but to make this move, she told USA Today.
Yahoo! plans to move users off of the Photos property over the next three months, but will be taking an unorthodox approach and not forcing people to Flickr. Users will be given the option of exporting their images to other sites, including competitors Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish and Photobucket. Exporting to Flickr will be a one-click process, according to Yahoo!
Flickr generally offers most of the tools that Yahoo! Photos offers. One area in which
Yahoo! currently trumps Flickr, however, is prints. While Flickr has started to offer
some printed products, such as photo cards via a partnership with Moo, Yahoo! Photos offers a full range of photo printing options, such as mugs, aprons, posters, and even custom bottles of wine via
the mail and for in store pick-up at Target department stores. I would guess that this
might be an important feature for many users, especially since Yahoo! Photos generally
caters to an older audience, which Yahoo! will need to move over to Flickr.
It is interesting to note that comScore reports a different story on traffic to photo websites than does Hitwise. According to March comScore data, Yahoo! Photos and Flickr both trump Photobucket for worldwide traffic and in the US, Flickr just overtook Yahoo! Photos for the first time. Together, they would by far equate to the largest photo website by traffic.
Conclusion
So what does this all mean? At one time, Yahoo! Photos was the place to share photos online, and it still hosts many more photos than Flickr (about 2 billion versus 500 million), but Yahoo!'s homegrown property was never able to match the buzz that Flickr created. Flickr has soared among a younger demographic, and merging the two competing properties was inevitable. Everyone expected it when Yahoo! bought Flickr in March 2005 (the way we all expect del.icio.us to eventually kill off MyWeb), it was just a matter of which site would eat the other.
This appears to be the famed "Peanut Butter Manifesto" in action as Yahoo! consolidates some of its redundant services (in fact, Brad Garlinghouse, SVP of Yahoo! and author of the memo, told Rafe Needleman last night he was "eating his own peanut butter"). But, Bill Tancer of Hitwise expects that Yahoo! will lose some users in the switch. What do you think?
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Yahoo! can minimize its losses through customer education.
I use Flickr and I would have been very "disappointed" IF Yahoo! had NOT chosen Flickr as the "survivor"
Posted by: Thomas Ho | May 4, 2007 9:59 AM
I guess it's sorta inevitable, since both products are redundant.
Just wondering when will del.icio.us and Yahoo! Bookmarks and MyWeb2 merge into one.
Posted by: wil | May 4, 2007 10:03 AM
and next year the headline will read, "Facebook eats Flickr", since more photo sharing is happening on facebook than on flickr, and it's a younger demographic.
Posted by: Harold Jarche | May 4, 2007 10:09 AM
Harold: Had Yahoo!'s attempted acquisition of Facebook gone through last year that might have been very likely. ;) (Though, I like to think some sort of API mashup whereby Facebook would host photos via Flickr but the two sites would remain separate would have been slicker... uh, or slickr ... sorry, I can't resist bad puns.)
Posted by: Josh Catone | May 4, 2007 10:20 AM
Yahoo is a great company...but they need to work on their marketing. Even more so if Microsoft succeeds in its takeover.
Posted by: KindAndThoughtful | May 4, 2007 11:24 AM
product duplication has long been a problem for Yahoo! in the past couple years... I think the switch from Yahoo! Photos to Flick was natural for most tech users. And it is good to see that Y! is not forcing users to switch to Flickr, otherwise, they will probably lose even more users...
wonder when will del.icio.us kills off myweb?
Posted by: Edmund | May 4, 2007 12:42 PM
Flickr & Yahoo photos seem to have rather different cultures. There are a lot of Yahoo-Photo-like photos on Flickr, but it still carries the boutique reputation formed by the online creative types who were first recruited to colonize it. I wonder how that's going to hold up to an onslaught of people sharing family and party photos.
Posted by: EAS | May 4, 2007 6:01 PM
Flickr has all the same printing options that Yahoo! Photos does (and more?). You just have to tell them where you live first: http://www.flickr.com/account/printing/setup/
Posted by: Udi | May 4, 2007 8:00 PM
I never was able to use flickr becuase of all the limits it puts on you.
I was really happy when the new Yahoo Photos came out and was even considering switching back from Tabblo which also does not have any limits but is not as easy for orginization as Yahoo Photos.
Posted by: jim | May 4, 2007 8:22 PM
@Udi #8: Ah, you're right that Flickr has more printing options (including pick up at Target), but they don't have all the printing options Yahoo! does, as far as I can tell. Things like mugs, magnets, t-shirts, puzzles, aprons, etc. that you can do at Yahoo! I don't see available at Flickr.
Also, Yahoo! appears to do most of their printing themselves, whereas except for prints, Flickr uses third-party services (which Yahoo! mostly also offers--and more of them... I don't see custom wines on Flickr, for example!).
For my part, I mostly use WinkFlash for photo printing (but the fact that they're located about 15 miles from my house and so deliver photos in about 2 days is a huge bonus for me :)).
Posted by: Josh Catone | May 4, 2007 11:22 PM
What happend to choice? One of the benifits of the Internet is that it offers choices and offers a choice for even a small group. Who cares that flickr or myspace has a younger demographic. Does this mean that eventually everything will be geared for the 10-year-old? Frankly, I use Yahoo! pictures extensivly and Flickr a little. My major online storage is on Webshots as it offers a higher quality of photos and is of much more interest to the serious photographer.
By-the-way, Flickr does not embed information in the photo. The tags are kept in separate files.
Posted by: expatinbulgaria | May 5, 2007 12:37 AM
Interesting to see how photobucket is holding so well...
Posted by: Ivan Minic | May 5, 2007 4:39 AM
I agree with the majority that it was about time and that I am glad it was not the other way around where Yahoo would takeover Flickr.
As far as consolidation goes, you will usually always loose users whether it is because of duplicate accounts or the user would like to try something new. That is normal, but I would think Yahoo will be automatically transferring all accounts to Flickr, so that should minimize the loss. The predicted amount of lost users would have been more interesting or a link to his Bill Trancer's prediction.
Posted by: kaz | May 5, 2007 12:17 PM
I think this is a really risky move for Yahoo -- Flickr is certainly trendy but I am not sure it's the kind of dumb simple photo app that your average Internet user needs/wants for photo sharing. I posted a blog entry on this same topic on my blog. You can check it out here: http://blog.charleshudson.net/?p=313
I still don't get why these two products can't co-exist as they seem to cater to distinct niches.
Posted by: Charles | May 6, 2007 12:32 PM
@14 "I still don't get why these two products can't co-exist as they seem to cater to distinct niches."
I think this is something Yahoo needed to do for a few reasons, the first being Consolidation, by having two separate properties Yahoo were being inefficient, why maintain two similar sites when you can have one (with the resources they save they could easily merge the two sites functionality quickly)
Secondly they need to keep up with the times, as can be seen from the chart in this post Web 2.0 is taking hold, primarily with young people using MySpace, Yahoo photos just didn't attract this audience which caused it to lose market share (though I would say there user base has not declined significantly if at all).
Thirdly I think branding was a key reason for this decision, Yahoo had there name tied to Yahoo photo's which I think could have caused some issues with adoption with the MySpace users as they don't identify strongly with the Yahoo brand.
In terms of profitability in the short term I think this is a bad move for Yahoo as the younger users will not often pay for this type of service but by adding sharing functionality (to use on community sites) and putting in Video (which has been recently noted as being something that is being added to Flickr) Yahoo will increase there reach and allow them to take this new audience.
Will probably have a bit more of a think and blog on this later (since I wrote half a post here).
Posted by: Daniel Gardner | May 6, 2007 4:47 PM
If the news is true, its a big "tragedy" for users like me!
Post switching to flickr, I see the following disadvantages:
1. limited uploading (100MB per month in flickr. Unlimited in Y! photos)
2. limited viewing (only 200 recent pics can be seen. Any pic can be seen in Y! photos)
3. No concept of albums in flickr (in Y! , you can organise in a better way, with the album concept)
4. For free users, u can only download re-sized resampled images in flickr, though u hav uploaded true-quality images (in Y!, you can download, what you uploaded. Nothing changes!)
I'm not too familiar with flickr, so not sure if the points given below are 100% true. But this is based on the info which i collected from flickr site. This will be a big negative impact on users, who rely on Y! photos for online photo storage. Hope Y! will address these issues after the switch-over...
Posted by: Ratheesh | May 6, 2007 10:38 PM
"Flickr generally offers most of the tools that Yahoo! Photos offers."
Yes, but Photos is free and so I think that unless Flickr's free features are dramatically expanded, or the whole thing is made free, this will be dumb move by Y!. I'd vote for making Flickr free. If the goal of a a web company is attracting "eyeballs," why send users to the competition? How much do those 24.95 subscriptions really add to the Yahoo bottom line?
Posted by: Ryan Williams | May 7, 2007 2:23 PM