Flickr Still a Key Part of Yahoo's Future
Blake Irving, Yahoo’s chief executive recently posted on Twitter: “Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable."
‘Hell yes!’ That’s exactly the kind of emotion we love to see in the search marketing industry! And it’s a strong statement of future intent from the company – that support will be crucial in the coming months, as visits to Flickr are considerably lower than in previous years.
Visits to Flickr from the US stood at 21.3 million in December 2010, which is a drop of 16 per cent from the previous year. Are social media sites such as Facebook taking the fun out of Flickr with their own photo sharing services? More than likely – it’s so simple to upload a photo onto Facebook and get an instant response from your friends and family.
In fact, comScore, who calculated the Flickr figures, say that an astonishing 123.9 million users visited Facebook’s photo features. So what’s the solution? Flickr is still popular with serious photography buffs who feel they get a lot more quality images on the site, as opposed to the odd good photo mixed in amongst some blurry nightclub shots on Facebook.
But Facebook appear to be addressing that issue by the day, so if Yahoo is indeed going to throw its weight behind Flickr, then a redesign or a relaunch may be required sooner rather than later. There doesn’t seem to be much wrong from a web design point of view – Flickr is clean, clear and accessible.
Selling Flickr as a quality photo service and pushing that ethos is most likely to be the way forward. Flickr’s Matthew Rothenberg seems to think so: "To me it's not a numbers game. I think we're trying to build the best experience that we can and make sure our users are engaged and happy and more and more of them will sign up.”
