Flickr is definitely warming up to the holiday season. First off, they have an Easter Egg and it can be revealed when you add a note to an image. In that note if you type ho ho ho beard or ho ho ho hat then that note will turn into a beard or hat, respectively. It is actually kinda fun and definitely creative! [via Boing Boing]
More importantly, however, is that Flickr announced free members can upload 100MB a month in images compared to the previous 20MB. Similarly (and even more amazing), anyone with a Flickr Pro account gets unlimited uploads instead of being restricted to just 2GB! That means for the $24.95 per year you will receive all of this:
- Unlimited uploads
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited photosets
- Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images
- The ability to replace a photo
- Ad-free browsing and sharing
Despite the free accounts having their limitations I have to admit that Flickr has set the bar very high for other photo services. Even Google’s Picasa Web Albums has a few different paid versions and Flickr makes Google look greedy:
- 6.25GB ($25 USD per year)
- 25GB ($100 USD per year)
- 100GB ($250 USD per year)
- 250GB ($500 USD per year)
So I wonder what these other companies are going to do now?
I can’t imagine Yahoo! is making any money off of Flickr. I remember hearing on an episode of TWIT that they only had like 20 orders for photo prints a month. Surely that’s only one of their sources of revenue for the site, but I can’t image enough people are paying for Pro Flickr accounts to cover for the high bandwidth costs for the site. Especially enough to cover all of the other free account users who eat up enormous amounts of bandwidth. And from what I can tell they only have a couple ads on their homepage, and nowhere else. While that may make some users happy, it is a horrible business plan, as I have to think Flickr has hemorrhaging bandwidth costs. Surely their photo printing service, paid Pro accounts, and ads on their homepage, can not even beginning to cover the costs of running the site.
I can’t imagine what Yahoo! was thinking when they bought flickr and then decided to set up such a weak business model for it.
I can’t tell you from personal experience that it is very difficult in the first place to making photo and video websites profitable, as the bandwidth and hosting plans out there simply have no evolved from the web 1.0 days. They haven’t evolved to cover for the huge bandwidth demands of many web 2.0 sites like youtube, and flickr. Just trying to make a site I am developing with a friend, Colbert On Demand, it can at times be a losing battle. And it becomes increasingly difficult to scale such sites as well, as they become popular. The Web has evolved in this web 2.0 movement, unfortunately bandwidth/hosting plans simply haven’t and need to play catch up, and frankly Ad Businesses like Google Adsense and those that follow Google’s model may need changing, as to give greater importance to page impressions for generating revenue. If I remember right, Google doesn’t pay for page impressions, or pays very very little. Hopefully in the coming couple years we’ll see hosting/bandwidth/advertising plans evolve along with the the web 2.0 movement.
I think Yahoo was probably thinking “we better sweep this up before someone else does” and in doing so I think that they were smart. Otherwise a competitor, like Google, would have jumped in and bought Flickr leaving Yahoo even more in the dark.
There are actually Google ads that pay per impression but that is only if someone signs up to advertise on your blog specifically. In the Google Adsense control panel there should be an option where you can enable this feature and it will add a link to your ads that says “Advertise on this site”. I have tried that though and the results are very poor (typically $0.15 to $0.35 per thousand impressions).
I think that by the time web hosting plans get to the point that they can manage Web 2.0 sites the emergence of Web 3.0 (I’m not sure what that will entail though, maybe offline web applications?) will have already begun.
I agree the need to scoop up a site like flickr before a competitor like google does…that was a wise move…but they can’t do such things solely for the purpose of competition, they have to have analyzed the situation and come up with a business model for something like tis before they go about acquiring it. They made their move without thinking about it first.
I suppose this is one of many reasons why Google will easily triumph over yahoo! and there is always the fact that yahoo’s services and acquisitions make it seem like yahoo is [seomoz.org]