Flickr: Strong On Content & Community, But Commerce Needs Work
Editor's note: Sramana Mitra is currently running a series on her blog reviewing the photo sharing industry. In this Read/WriteWeb post, she looks at Flickr's offering using her Web 3.0 framework.
Before I get to my analysis, here is a quick overview of Flickr's history and its current position. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Ludicorp, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based company, launched Flickr in February 2004. Flickr is a photo-sharing site, familiar to most of you, which allows users to search, upload, create photo albums and share them with community members. Flickr has 17 million unique monthly visitors. The company was taken over by Yahoo! in March 2005. Flickr has over 8 million registered users with over 500 million photos.
Flickr won multiple Webby awards in 2007, including Best Navigation / Structure, Best Practices and Breakout of the Year award. Yahoo! recently announced that it will merge its Yahoo! Photos with Flickr and terminate Yahoo! Photos. Flickr has two account options, Free and Pro, is very well organized and easy to navigate and has a very pleasant look. Now let's look at Flickr using my Web 3.0 framework...
Context
Flickr is a photo-sharing site and has a public database of photos and images categorized into "Most Views", "Most Favorited", "Most Comments" and "Most Interesting". The site allows photos to be viewed as slideshow and users can develop their personal profile and create groups.
The tagging facility is excellent and I really like the ability to organize a set of photos under a theme. Flickr has got its context bang on and the geo tagging capability allows users to search for photos across the globe, especially those that users would not have otherwise discovered easily. However, there is a pretty significant map spam issue coming up on this, not to be ignored.
One thing that I find unsatisfactory, however, is that Flickr has Fine Art Photography, Travel Photography, Family Photos. When I do a search on the Himalayas, I don't really care to see some family pictures of random tourists against the Kanchenjungha, but rather, I want to see great pictures of mountains, mountain people, wildlife.
Kanchenjungha from Sandakphu (in case you're interested); photo by v_lochan89
On the other hand, sites like Geni attempt to capture photosharing in the context of genealogy, where family photos are the essence. Family photos are also the essence when they're being shared within a private group. But randomly, one doesn't care to see family photos of strangers.
These are examples of Contexts where Flickr leaves something to be desired.
Content
Flickr offers a free membership including monthly uploads up to 20 MB, photostream views of 200 most recent images, three albums and displays up to 100 photos at a time.
Flickr with its advanced tools offers multiple options for photo uploading. Up to 100 images can be uploaded at a time - as single files or batches on Windows XP, 2000, ME and 98, Flickr Uploadr for Mac OS X 10.3 or higher, 1001 for Mac OS X and iPhoto plugins for Mac OS X. Photos can be uploaded by Windows XP Explorer, email or camera-phone using ShoZu or Nokia Lifeblog.
Flickr offers a Pro Account priced at $25 annually with unlimited storage, and thus monetizes its entirely user-generated content.
Commerce
Flickr allows its users to create and showcase their own Flickr products made of photographs - like photobooks, toys, calendars, cards, t-shirts, postage stamps. These products are produced and sold by partners such as Zazzle, Imagekind, MOO, QOOP.
I would have been happier if I could offer my work to other users and earn royalties from it.
Flickr also offers printing services, but they are not as elaborate as others - like Shutterfly and Kodak Gallery, where I can order prints online (as well as a whole array of other photo merchandise). Flickr could also consider retailing cameras, video and DVD recorders through its site, but thus far, it seems like Flickr is avoiding transactional e-commerce altogether, and puts everything through affiliates.
Community
Flickr has amazing community features. Users can upload their photographs, rate photographs, add tags to public photos; or interact with like-minded Flickr members by forming groups, adding contacts, or posting comments on discussion boards.
The Creative Commons section enables users to offer their works to be utilized for non-commercial non-derivative use. Flickr also allows users to create photosets, which are online photo albums, for their friends, family or preferred groups - to see as slideshows or simply browse through them.
Personalization
Flickr does not compel you to become a member and allows you to explore the site before you become a member. One just needs to have a Yahoo! Mail ID to be a Flickr member. I have my customized page giving me details of the photographs uploaded, number of explores, my groups, contacts, which of my community members are online, my public vs private photos. Flickr allows privacy with options like "control image access", an essential feature.
Flickr also allows me to keep my favorite photo links in del.icio.us (another Yahoo! property), allowing me to access them from anywhere and share them with my family, friends, and colleagues.
What I don't see is a personalized recommendation feature. Or did I miss it?
Vertical Search
Flickr allows users to search photos by photographer, tag, time, text, group, camera, and yes, by place. Flickr allows me to search by interesting options like creative commons, popular tags, last 7 days, and This month. It also offers multiple choices for photograph sizes, square, and thumbnail, medium, large. I would prefer more options, including portrait, landscape, humanity, travel, etc. - although some of this can be accomplished through the extremely intelligent tagging capabilities.
I also liked the "Camera Finder" segment. It tracks the most popular camera and camera phones among the Flickr users. It is a good way of tracking the popularity of cameras and camera phones among the Flickr community. It also reviews the popular cameras and provides detailed features through its integration with Yahoo! Shopping.
Business Model
Subscription is the main source of revenue for Flickr. The photo-sharing site has entered into a direct alliance with social networking browser Flock. This may play a significant role in online sharing of resource and media, and receiving content updates and search.
With an Alexa rank of 43, Flickr is fast growing as a photo-sharing site that also serves as a social network and photography-aficionado destination. According to Hitwise, Flickr has 4.5% market share of the photo uploading and sharing market.
Web 3.0 Rating: Context: A-; Content: A+; Community: A+; Commerce: B-; Personalization: A-; Vertical Search A-; Overall Rating: A
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LOLLLLLLL
Yeah i think Flickr needs to start Paying People for all the awesome FREE content they provide!!
thass the kinda eCommerce Sharing we'd love to see!!
;PPP
"When I do a search on the Himalayas, I don't really care to see some family pictures of random tourists ... but rather, I want to see great pictures of mountains."
I just did a search on the Himalayas, and saw lots of exactly what you asked for: mountains, people, and wildlife, and no clumsy photos of tourists at all. This is because by default, searches return photos organized by "most relevant". Arguably, nicer photos are shown first if you sort by "most interesting."
It's not really reasonable to expect Flickr to be magic: in the context of great natural places, you don't want to see pictures of grubby backpackers, but what if you search on "hiking"? The way Flickr's gotten around these kind of context issues is pretty damn smart.
You can actually offer your work to others as prints via Flickr's partnership with Imagekind. They import Flickr photos to either create products such as prints, canvas, and framed pieces - but they also allow anyone to import and sell prints, or otherwise, of their Flickr photos. This is all free, and the photographer gets 100% royalties.
They are doing it right and making improvements as time goes on. What they have delivered so far is very well done.
I think it photographers and business owners use Flickr properly they can manage the commerce aspect on their own just leveraging Flickr as one tool in their commerce toolbox.
Flickr shouldn't be a business owners only avenue to monetize their image / photo portfolio.
The traffic and social aspect should be enough.
While I think Flickr has some nice community features, they do a terrible job promoting community features and content on the site.
You would think that they might make an effort to promote content from your groups on the home page (not just a link, but show actual photos from your groups like Photos from my Contacts). Or maybe surface popular or highly-rated photos there.
Instead, I get over 1/3 of my home page dedicated to commerce offerings (Moo, Qoop, Zazzle) or Flickr feature updates.
So I agree that they have great content and nice community features; however, they don't do much to help you discover or use them.
Uh...you can earn money through Imagekind from your Flickr images by simply importing your flickr images directly into your Imagekind account.
Actually, the Camera Finder feature is broken, at least partially. The Nokia N80 stats and new images have been frozen for quite a long time (in web years). There was a support topic that was acknowledged by Flickr staff and the stats were updated for a few days and have been broken again ever since. This information was also posted to the support thread but nothing has been done. So, yes, Flickr still "needs work" for sure... but it's still the best thing out there! :)