Yahoo has continued its march into oblivion over the past few years. Of all the Yahoo products and services, I only found Flickr the saving grace. But it seems, Yahoo does not think much of its photo storing and sharing service.
According to Marketing Land, Yahoo has laid off it apparently 12% of Flickr staff. This includes much of the customer service team.
What exactly is killing Flickr?
Picasa from Google was hardly used by people to upload photos, especially when compared to Flickr. Flickr kept growing and has more than 5 billion images on it. But social media websites like Facebook were a challenge as people probably found it a lot more convenient for sharing personal photos. Picasa has seen a spurt in growth only after it has become integrated with Google+.
In general, the lack of innovation on Flickr over the past two or three years has made its usage quite stagnated.
Will it join the Yahoo casualty list?
I am not sure about this as yet, but it is obvious that there are big problems ahead for Flickr. Yahoo did sell off Delicious, which ended up being a good idea. Yahoo itself as a company has an uncertain future while it has gone from being a $100 billion dollar company to $22 billion over the past few years.
Hopefully Yahoo offloads Flickr to a better company and not close it down like it did with Geocities. What are your views on Flickr’s fate? Do drop in your comments.
5 Comments
It would be a pity if Yahoo kills Flickr.
I am a Flickr user for 5 years, and agree that it is stagnating during last 2-3 years.
One of the reason: focus on USA and America.
Where are menus in national languages of BRIC countries, the fastest growing part of the world? They are not available.
And Flickr Pro account is expensive. It doesn’t have enough value for $25 per year. And distracts new users from the service.
Flick is going to die soon, very timely post Aditye. You guys might find interesting that very nice social network to share favorite stuff is building up and has already gain some big rankings! its PInterest.
@Hammad: Yes, Pinterest is interesting and we have already covered it.
your new theme and new attractive logo was really awesome 🙂 yes its true so many people use picasa for Uploading&sharing images .. you are right .. very interesting info 🙂
Thanks for liking our new theme and logo. We are also ringing in some new changes with Dw content wise, you can read more about it at this post dedicated to redesign.
About Picasa being used increasingly, it is only happening after Google+ made it a default place to park images. 🙂