How many flickr users are there

This period in time roughly aligns with two major tech revolutions: the smartphone revolution and the rise of social networks. Both have eaten the world. Not just photography services, every website. And not just websites, even our political system. During these years, Yahoo was asleep and showed little sign of adjusting to this new reality. A lot of companies struggle to this day to stay relevant in the new tech world order. In other words, tier 3 took a heavy hit.

Not just at Flickr. About 8 years into the smartphone era and with social network monopolies established, Yahoo management figured that these things may be here to last, and perhaps require some type of response. Flickr was to be revitalized into relevance by means of two drastic actions:. A Shitty Redesign. They used the battle-tested method of Modern Design to be absolutely sure that every single user hates it:.

I could make that list a lot longer but the point stands, it was not well received. They did try to fix some of these issues later. Free storage for all Here we come to the nail in the coffin. The absurd decision was made to grant the free tier users of Flickr a whopping 1 TB! It makes no sense in any universe, ever. First, it upsets and alienates existing Pro users. They paid for extra value that includes generous storage, and now see this value reduced.

Some moved to the free tier as a result. Some stayed on Pro yet lost trust. Some simply left. Not only are Pro users a source of steady cash-flow, they are also ambassadors of your service. The passionate, loyal group that also tend to contribute some of the best content. Upsetting Pros is an incredibly bad idea.

As explained in the tier model, your non-curated source material should be stored in tier 0 and tier 1: storage services. Encouraging the dumping of giant quantities of unfiltered content is bad for community, but also not financially sustainable. Third, the math simply cannot work. Storage cost money, it never ever is free.

This comparison is more complex. Google Photos is very generous to offer unlimited storage of reduced quality photos, yet it is no fair comparison to full quality storage as seen at Flickr. To store higher quality photos, the price for 1 TB is confusing to determine. Which is very costly, twice as expensive as Apple. Same situation. More expensive than Flickr Pro, which has no storage limitation at all.

Even more complex as their OneDrive product is often bundled with Office. The free tier is 5 GB, equally tiny as Apple. A fitting lapse in judgement was when Microsoft announced in October that Office users would get unlimited storage as part of an Office subscription. It took them a year to learn how huge of a mistake this was, after which they brought back the 1 TB cap.

You know the answer. Some of the richest companies in the world do not go beyond giving away a mere 5 to 15 GB of free storage. These prices are normal, healthy market prices that I expect to approach the true cost of the service.

Buy a 1 TB disk. Next buy at least one more, but probably 2 or 3 more for the sake of redundancy. Buy or rent multiple physical properties to place the disks. Next, lease the biggest network pipe you can afford to connect the locations. Write the management and fault recovery software to maintain integrity.

Pay for energy, pay taxes. Finally, do all of the above dozens of times across the world to realize a global storage service. Next, produce documentation in every language, hire local accountants, marketeers and staff help desks. Storage is expensive for good reasons, and naturally, lots of storage is lots of expensive.

Flickr was giving away an insane amount of value for free, value that has very real world costs associated with them. I suppose the theory at the time was that these costs could be recovered from ads. The redesign and generous free tier was a desperate attempt to play with the big boys. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and the like. It failed.

Yes, this would be where I make my first point. I needed to set up all of the above context and history to properly make it. All of this user outrage is understandable. Deleting content is an internet sin. When somebody out of the blue doubles a price, it would usually be an instant cancel for me. So the outrage is OK. It is as expected. My point, however, is that the outrage is targeted at exactly the wrong company, and often in unfair ways.

Without SmugMug, Flickr would no longer exist today. It would simply have been shutdown. Remember that. The user-hostile measures now being taken by SmugMug are to undo the damage done by Yahoo management.

Reportedly, it was losing tens of millions of dollars per year post acquisition. So yes, measures are going to be painful to users. But as a user, which scenario do you prefer:. The only viable option is 3. Which is no fun option. But it is needed. A lot of things would break and be lost without Flickr. Yet the anger is there, and we need some place to direct it to.

The end of the Yahoo era was marked by the sale of all its assets, including Flickr, to Verizon. Think about this amount of money. A fraction of it could turn around Flickr. It could be spent on talented engineers to build the next phase, fix bugs and work out a business model that does work. Whilst it would be unfair to blame the failing of Yahoo products on its last management generation only, the exit phase is a good old money grab.

An insane amount of money was rewarded to a tiny group of people. A group of people that ran failing products further into the ground, and got insanely rich as a reward. Did any of them ever consider the cultural, educational and artistic value of Flickr? Its important role on the web? What would happen to employees? Did they spend one second thinking about the impact on the user base?

Zero shits were given. They took everything for themselves, and the rest of us get nothing. Employees, users and the entirety of the internet can simply go fuck themselves. Soon after, Verizon realized they bought junk and had to write of billions in the books. Verizon is an extraordinarily rich company. A single drop of that money say 50 million could revamp a service like Flickr. Did they show any interest in such a recovery? No, obviously. Similar to Yahoo, they too would have no problem destroying something part of the fabric of the internet.

Where am I going with this? Be angry, but not at SmugMug. For the record, targeting your outrage correctly at greedy corporate executives is equally pointless. Nothing will be undone. Yes I am, and this is strange given that:. Yahoo was not a photography company. Yahoo was a disconnected portfolio of mediocre products existing for the sole purpose of milking ad revenue. Not even that was a requirement, how else can you explain Tumblr? Verizon clearly had even less interest in photographers. SmugMug is a photography business.

They exist since As a company exclusively focusing on photography and photographers. They pioneered reliable photo storage and sharing online. They know print. They know portfolios. They know photographers and they know what they need.

They make money from photographers, not ads. Stark difference. Flickr is now owned by a photography company. It has had clueless, greedy owners since No more.

It is now owned by the most reputable photography business who has been in this game since That has to be a win.

Flickr has been returned to photographers. SmugMug is vastly different from the typical tech startup company. Startups generally follow this cycle:. It turns users and customers into the product. Tracking will be added. Ads and business content will be added. Popular content will no longer be community controlled, it will be algorithm controlled. They are working on the algorithms.

Endlessly refining and tuning it to optimize clicks, views, bounce rates and other measures of engagement. Not just for this single service. An entire generation of engineering talent is wasted on getting you to click on things and to show ads. By exploiting psychological weaknesses in the human mind. Poisoning our mind at planetary scale.

Its impact goes far beyond mere commerce, it leaks into politics and the mindset of young people in very damaging ways. Some may feel inspired by users who managed to bend this model into enormous personal success, the influencers. These users had a first mover advantage, luck, are great at sales, have a lot of friends, or simply do have great content.

Likely a combination of these factors. However they came to power, they are not your ally. They are exactly the same as the parent company. They want you to subscribe to their content, to maximize views. They are the human version of the algorithm. This is how you get the situation where for every single influencer having millions of subscribers, you may have ten thousand photographers of equal skill having almost none at all.

The game of exposure is seized by ad-optimizing algorithms and influencers snowballing into power, the rest can fight for crumbs.

All of the horror described above can be summed up as the cost of free. You do not get a seat at the attention table, you get to lick boots. Where was I going with this? Oh yes. SmugMug is the exact opposite of all of the above. It does not have crazy founders seeking world domination. Their product is paid with money, in the same way you pay a bakery for bread. It is profitable and has been profitable, stable and healthy during its entire existence.

Or, to put it in other words: SmugMug is not evil. It has proven to not be evil for 17 years in a row. They are the good guys in photography. So that is what has upset me most, users and media shitting all over SmugMug as if they are evil, clueless, and greedy.

They are none of these things, all of these accusations apply to the previous owners of Flickr and most of Big Tech in general. This caused a significant tonal shift in our platform, away from the community interaction and exploration of shared interests that makes Flickr the best shared home for photographers in the world.

Second, you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Reducing the free storage offering ensures that we run Flickr on subscriptions, which guarantees that our focus is always on how to make your experience better. You are our priority. Thank you for caring about Flickr. Thank you for supporting Flickr. Thank you for being a Flickr Pro. Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year. Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being shut down and to save tens of billions of your precious photos from being erased.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services AWS , the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again. Franck Michel By: Franck Michel. What explains the severe drop between the blue and red curves?

Taken on March 20,