I am at the annual Outcast CEO Dinner event – Brad Garlinghouse (Yahoo SVP Communications & Communities) and Stewart Butterfield (Cofounder Flickr) are sitting at my table and told me that they will announce the closure of Yahoo Photos tomorrow. The actual closure will occur over the next few months, they say.
The service will be shut down in favor of the newer and more social Flickr, which they acquired in March of 2005. There has long been an issue at Yahoo where newer services have competed with older services, and Yahoo has finally taken some strong action to getting their house in order with a consistent set of product offerings. Garlinghouse has been one of the stronger proponents of this strategy.
Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr – instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly. Most of these services have built special tools to transition users, Butterfield said. Users will also be able to download full sized original photos, or order CDs and prints at a discount to the normal price. “We have no interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr” Butterfield said. “We want happy users.”
Yahoo Photos is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and coincidentally has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.
The first graph below shows only U.S. traffic for Flickr and Yahoo. The table below that shows March Comscore numbers for the worldwide audience.
| Site | Unique Visitors(M) | Yahoo! Photos | 31.1 |
| Flickr | 28.5 |
| Photobucket | 28.1 |
| Facebook Photos | 23.5 |
Butterfield also confirmed that Flickr will “soon” allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.
it’s about time. Yahoo has too many internally competing services Flickr vs. Yahoo photo is a completely silly waste of corporate resources.
http://www.ebizmba.com
a ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch
one of two courses here:
1. they port everyone to flickr and regular folk wonder why yahoo is screwing with them and why the page and url have suddenly changed. this is the sensible route for the company, but users hate change. there is also the possibility of breaking this migration.
2. they simply stop new users from using photos but continue to support the old ones, turning photos into a leper colony, although a leper colony that doesn’t surprise users (as in, surprise = bad)
either way its a classic case of mismanagement
Other than that, how’s the rest of dinner going?
haha, I didn’t even know there was a Yahoo Photos, I always just used Flickr. Why was around this long?
Bravo to Brad for eating some of his own peanut butter, and shutting one of two competing internal services
I have to agree with Jeremy
Bloggin’ in the middle of a dinner? Is the food that bad?
Anyway, it’s interesting to see that they’ll give users the option to migrate to a competing service. What have they put in that peanut butter?
Flickr costs 24.50 for it to be useful which means that yahoo is basically killng the free service and forcing people to upgrade.
Great move! I wonder why it have taken so long to make that decision.
great chart. nice illustration how superior technology can eventually overtake brand and an installed user base. would have been nice to see the chart start from acquisition date (march 2005).
although yahoo! does deserve some flack for the 2 year period to finally make the migration, you do have to give them credit for recognizing the potential in technology and talent they got when you grabbed flickr.
once this migration is done, let’s see how long it takes to try and catch youtube.
Thts really good news and bad news…Flickr should increase support for multiple albums (sets thts what they call) And ofcourse some more bandwidht…20MB is simply not sufficient.
@jigar – Pro accounts are only $24 and limit-free. You’d like it.
This is not so good news.Lots of people use Yahoo! photos for sharing private photos and not aware of flickr’s guess pass.Hope its advertized a little more.
@jagar shah : flickr monthly limit is 100MB. http://flickr.c...help/photos/#17
Has Yahoo mentioned whether or not they will be allowing free users of Flickr to store unlimited number of photos and unlimited albums (not the current 200 photos). If not, then this move will surely alienate a huge number of Yahoo users. I do love Flickr – it’s interface and features are incredibly more useful and user friendly than Yahoo Photos. However, I still used Yahoo Photos as an easy and free way to store all my original-resolution photos online for anyone to see. If Yahoo doesn’t bring this ability to its free Flickr accounts, then the only major service left that allows free full-resolution storage of an unlimited number of photos will be AOL Pictures, and that thought really scares me. Please, Yahoo, make it right – give free Flickr users the abilities you’ve given to free Yahoo Photos users until now.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a photo on Yahoo! Photos. BTW, for another interesting chart on image and video search, take a look at this brief analysis of the players in the space.
http://www.spar...nute.com/?p=133
Wasn’t this inevitable new taking on the old. Who was using yahoo photos anyways was yahoo itsefl upgrading yahoo photos?i thoght it closed long time back
I’m really surprised (in a bad way) that Yahoo! would decide to completely close down the Yahoo! Photos, which is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet. While it’s good they will make it easy to migrate photos to other places, including competitors. I still say that the decision stinks.
Sharing Is Caring!
It’s interesting to see comments such as “I didn’t know Yahoo! Photos existed” or “I can’t remember the last time I saw a photo on Yahoo! Photos”. It shows that TechCrunch readers are quite savvy with this internet thing. If you want to know who is using Yahoo! Photos, just ask your Mom or Pop or Uncle Phil – i.e., the majority of people.
Here are the options Yahoo had:
1) keep supporting both Yahoo photos and Flickr.
2) get rid of Flickr
3) get rid of Yahoo photos
option 1 is a bad idea as it was explained in the famous peanut butter manifesto and option 2 would’ve been insane!
#19 there’s another option:
4) Integrate both services under the one that Yahoo decides to keep moving forward.
From what Mike says, they’re no doing that – they’re shutting down Y!Photos, letting users know it’s coming and give them alternatives.
BTW I wouldn’t say Flickr is “superior technology”. Each service offers features that the other doesn’t have. So there is a risk, but worth taking in the long term IMHO.
I sincerely hope that no one is surprised by this.
I guess user on Flickr is photo enthusiastic and yahoo photos / Photobucket / Shutterfly are serving the “need” (sharing privately).
So migrating “yahoo photo” user to Flickr is tricky, though Yahoo can give users one click transfer of their photo albums to Flickr “sets” (private by default).
BTW, why Yahoo is sharing pie of 2 billion photos with Photobucket and Shutterfly?
This step reminds me this…
http://www.tech...his-power-move/
That seems rather stupid, especially after redesigning YPhotos!, and then having the largest number of users. I wonder what the exact reason for the shut down is. Although good on Yahoo! for giving their customers options in where to take their pictures.
I want to hear more about video coming to Flickr!! Flickrites have been looking for a “flickr for video” for years now, the closest being IMO Vimeo. I wonder if it’ll be integrated side by side (ala Picasa Web Albums), or a separate section of a user’s account. I guessing this is more the “short home videos people record” type video service, while YouTube will keep the “mashups/legal content/digital repository” side of things.
It’s a very welcome change from Yahoo.
I think, it’s very high time Yahoo should get rid of MyWeb & Beta bookmark in favor of del.icio.us
The real big news here is in the last sentence: “Butterfield also confirmed that Flickr will ’soon’ allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.” This is huge!
It’s high time for Yahoo to sell itself to Google.
One more thing …yahoo does not include album feature back to fickr or does not increase number of ’sets’ its definately gonna loose market instead of gaining. And look at their inconsistent user interface. Flickr from no angle looks like yahoo product. Look at picassa, gmail …google docs and spreadsheets….consistent look through out the system. Yahoo photos had similar interface like yahoo mail beta. Consistency really makes difference while using a product.
Good news for users but are they freakin’ stupid???
i don’t need video hosting at flickr. i can use one of 1000 other sites offering this feature.
Yahoo photos and Flickr are not that intersecting. Both have its own niche users. When Google has been on with Google Videos and YouTube for so long, Yahoo might also follow suit..
The users from Yahoo probably will go now to Picasa for example
Jigar you must not have used flickr in a while, they’ve added a ‘collections’ feature
which lets you makes subsets of sets.
Oh please, please, please Flickr don’t have videos. Flickr has built itself a market being a quality photo site. Vidoes are very different, vastly more likely to cause copyright issues and, most importantly, there are many other services providing vidoes.
On a more controversial note, it seems to me that the average wit of a comment-maker on Flickr is substantially higher than a comment-maker on YouTube – many videos seems to be plagued with the most inane comments. Do videos encourage this, or is this just an effect of the particular site that YouTube is?
It was brave of Yahoo! to shut down photos. Stupid in the first place to have two similar services – like Google video and YouTube, but I’m pretty sure the GOOG would have migrated accounts to their service first.
Yahoo! have some really valuable web properties at the moment. If they can streamline their offerings, they can focus more on brand building and promoting these services.
Great! Flickr is a superior implementation of photo management – I don’t care if Yahoo Photos has more pictures, the tools are better at Flickr.
This shows that Yahoo is serious about “peanut butter abatement”. One brand. One photo management web site.
Good to see them cut the peanut butter.
Any word if any jobs will be affected by this decision?
This announcement makes me fear for Flickr.
First of all, the temptation to rebrand it to something lame like “Yahoo Photo Sharing Engine” just got that much bigger.
Secondly, the influx of new users has a potential to create another “September that never ends”
And finally – video? I can only hope that part is wrong. Flickr has a great reputation among photography enthusiasts, but photography has nothing to do with video. Just look at the difference in the community between Flickr and Youtube… the two just don’t mix. And talk about peanut butter – they do have Yahoo Video, are they going to be shutting that down as well?
You know there are some other options out there. I mean, I use Flickr Pro, primarily for the network effects (my pals) and the API (so many great services work with Flickr). But Zooomr.com offers comparable features and a lot more free storage. I think they’re still giving away their Pro accounts.
If all you care about is photo storage, and you don’t already have a network, why not use Zooomr? http://beta.zooomr.com/home. Also, isn’t Yahoo letting you port your photos to Photobucket? What’s wrong with that option?
Finally something being done right by Yahoo.
From a business point of view, it is pretty shocking that they actually give users a choice to export pix to competing sites. I am puzzled as to why they don’t simply transfer the photos to flickr, and next time users login to Yahoo Photos they would be redirected to their flickr acct, and that would be it… Bizarre…
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We Will Create Your Very Own Domain Name – http://PowerNamer.com
Target has a partnership with yahoo photos so people can upload pictures through Yahoo and get them printed at target. I wonder if this will affect this.
This is a good opportunity for one of the other photo sharing services to step up and offer the same features that Yahoo Photos had in order to gain market share.
Being in this business myself, I think this is a bad move. Flickr is awesome because their authorship base is primarily the pro-consumer niche. People go to Flickr to look at the great photos there, not to look at a bunch of “Alpha Mom” content like soccer games, and babies spitting up blended carrots.
A recent survey showed that the authorship (creation/uploading of content) on Flickr was about 0.2% of the usage of Flickr. That it is so low is why the content on Flickr is so good.
People love to love Flickr because, at the end of the day, they love to look at the quality content on Flickr. It will be a HUGE challenge to separate the different types of content coming in from a different demographic/niche ongoing. They better have considered how well they can keep what makes Flickr unique intact ongoing – otherwise the older user base is going to bail on them.
Zoto targets the “Alpha Mom” demographic directly, encouraging uploading of babies, baseball games, and family events. While we have some basic community sections, we aren’t trying to be a community like Flickr. If you have some baby pics you’d like to share with your friends and family, check it out.
Multiply (http://multiply.com) offers free unlimited photo sharing (among other things) and can import from Yahoo Photos. Of course, it’s not the “free” and “unlimited” parts that attracted me to Multiply, but the excellent privacy controls and the flexibility it offers.
I’m surprised that they are actually shutting it down rather than cutting off new accounts. Generally, if a service is shutting down, you just prevent new users from joining and it will eventually dwindle.
I think its great news. I actually asked flickr help guys for this option 2 years back when I got PRO and they said its not in their TO DO list for now. The only thing scares me is the should not compromise the quality of flickr.
Mike,
Do you have any additional insight into why Yahoo chose to favor Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, and Shutterfly? Did they come to some kind of agreement behind closed doors? Is there some unseen connection between these companies and Yahoo?
Why did Yahoo choose these competitors and not others like SmugMug, Zooomr, Bubbleshare, and Zoto? These companies, who are smaller and more innovative, would surely have been able to offer comparable (if not superior) service to the Yahoo user base than the ancient web 1.0 dinosaurs who were chosen instead. Why is Yahoo favoring the big companies and shutting out the smaller ones?
Big business gets bigger. And the little guys get shut out. It’s seems a tad unfair. Don’t you think?
Prakash,
I had never heard of Multiply.com. It looks pretty cool. It strikes more of a MySpace alternative than a strict photo hosting service. I will check it out.
It’s about friggen’ time.