Flickr, Yahoo’s photo property, is one of the largest picture sharing services in the world. However, if you were to ask a group of random people how you spell its domain, a high percentage would likely tell you F-L-I-C-K-E-R. That’s not surprising, but it’s undoubtedly longstanding a headache for Yahoo. And now the people who own Flicker.com are looking to capitalize on it.
If you visit the site, you’ll see that it now exposes its traffic stats in the lower right-hand corner. It’s a blatant attempt to make money, at the very least from advertisers willing to throw links on the page. Or presumably to get someone to buy the domain.
Here are the stats they publish:
Flicker by the numbers:
Unique Visits:
3.6MM /yrSource:
Direct Navigation (95.74%)Outbound Clicks:
400K /yrCPC Keyword Values:
(Photography equipment)
$2.50 -$3.00 /clickDaily Value to Advertisers:
$2700.00 – $3300.00(Data is approximate, tracking by Google Analytics)
Below that is a link to contact them.
You’ll notice that over 95% of the traffic comes from direct navigation. That’s because if you Google “Flicker,” you’ll find flickr.com first, and flicker.com nowhere to be found on the first page of results. And that means that millions of people each year are typing in “flicker.com” likely expecting flickr.com. Certainly, that’s worth something, and Flicker knows it.
But the people who own flicker.com probably shouldn’t hold their breath for Yahoo to buy the domain anytime soon. After all, they’re busy selling off their own killer domain names on the cheap to make money.
And so the site is resorting to rather shady tactics. While its main page claims that it’s down for maintenance, there’s a Twitter button right next to that to tweet out that it’s down for maintenance. You might think that most sites wouldn’t want people to know that they’re site is down, but not Flicker. That’s because they clearly want people to advertise on their new “down” website.
And it’s working, look at how many people are actually tweeting this garbage out. You can be sure that a lot of them think Yahoo’s Flickr is down, and they’re just trying to let others know. Flicker has its own Twitter account that highlights all these tweets.
On the site below its maintenance message, you’ll find a bunch of links to camera equipment (the same group Flicker directly appeals to with its ‘CPC Keyword Value’ stats). And just to keep things even more shady, all of these links are bit.ly shortened links.
Update: As commenter Noah points out, some of those Bit.ly links aren’t exactly bathing in traffic. This one has only 500 clicks in the past two weeks.
Now they will even get more traffic from TC.
Their trap was very well laid out for a TC post
They should sell to MSN or Google out of spite
>>It’s a blatant attempt to make money
Gasp. You mean they’re running it like a business, like TechCrunch?
Exactly! The post sounds like there might be some jealousy involved in this situation. Why shouldn’t people try to make some money by buying or registering domain names that will get them more traffic/advertisers?
Not a bad idea
Flickr was dumb and dumbr for doing that.
I bet they’re partying like hell because of the free traffic from this post, too.
Mighty shady, but hey, the domain name owner can (pretty much) do whatever they want.
I’d do the same thing if I owned that domain.
I like that the domain is registered through a seemingly nonexistent (on the web at least) Security Shield LLC … it has a domain to go to, but I get an error when going to the site.
GOOG should buy it to push relevant traffic to Picassa…
I like that idea.
I’m sorry, but those bit.ly links only have about 500 clicks total since June 13th of this year: http://bit.ly/info/KXXjR
Oh nice!
The top link ‘B&H Photo Video’ has 6,351 clicks in the last 30 days
There are 21 links on that page, the 20,000-30,000 clicks they seem to be getting a month doesn’t seem bad for a site that requires no work. I don’t know who much they are getting per click but should be enough to give a nice income for someone.
B&H and other photo affiliate programs pay low rates (like 2 or 3%) but the size of orders of photo equipment can be quite good.
GOOG should purchase to drive relevant traffic to picassa… cheap way of converting users… i say cheap… in the long term
Wait, you mean these folks have the audacity to try to make some money using perfectly legal and legitimate means? How dare they try to capitalize on the tech industry by using a savvy method of gaining viewers!! (sarcasm off)
legal, yes
legitimate, not really,
ethical, no
i say domain ownership should be taxed 150%
Exactly! Judging by the comments to this article, there are a lot of domain squatters among TC readers.
The real Flickr should have picked a different name, but I doubt that they are rethinking their great success. Yes, Igniguy, if they were to tax the guy $15, which is 150% of the $10 annual registration fee, I am positive that this guy will give up right away. Your brilliant 150% tax is a surefire deterrent.
I don’t think traffic from TC makes them anything. People that read this blog don’t click thru on sites like that.
Only people dumb enough to type in flicker wrong do that.
^^^meh, sorry for double post :S
More power to them!
If you owned that domain, what would you do instead?
This site has been doing this for a while now (http://web.arch...://flicker.com/) – what I have never understood is that if it is worth something then put some ads on it and cash some cheques while your waiting to sell it.
Have a basic camera or photography site and have some ads. Leaving so much money on the table from type in traffic just to have bragging rights is crazy.
Cheers – Eric
Seriously, is it the domain owners’s fault that they registered Flicker.com half a dozen years before anyone had the brainwave to start a webservice named Flickr?
TC, this was an incredibly immature and stupid post. What would you guys do tomorrow if one of your domains suddenly starts registering 100k visits a day? Donate the money to charity?
I will agree on the post being a bit weird for TC but I think what Mr. Siegler didn’t include is the missing link of making it a great post actually. The reason they are asking for people to retweet is to damage the real Flickr and make Yahoo buy the domain to silence their propaganda!
So dastardly clever.
Good for Flicker. I wish I owned that site.
Why is it a “Blatant attempt?”
It is their property. Let them market it.
Always finding a way to chastise the little guy.
I would do the same exact thing. Like Chris Desouza said “Always finding a way to chastise the little guy.”
When they decided to create Flickr, I’m assuming they looked up the real Flicker.com. Why not just buy it then? Instead, they opted to capitalize on the web 2.0 deliberate misspelling craze and now this guy is capitalizing on that in the opposite direction. More power to him, why should he fold over for the big guys.
umn, flickr *started* the web 2.0 deliberate misspelling craze, and they did so because as a young, innovative startup they didn’t have the money to fork over to some domain squatter.
“When they decided to create Flickr, I’m assuming they looked up the real Flicker.com. Why not just buy it then?”
because it wasn’t available, obviously, because someone was sitting on it, asking for money that flickr didn’t have at the time.
stats screenshots from their twitterstream
http://bit.ly/1awZ5F, http://bit.ly/KMviO
Earlier today someone wrote about Flicker/Flickr too
http://www.thed...buy-flickercom/
Try to follow Flickerdotcom on twitter, you get autotweet notice site is down. These guys are good!!!
They also cover 404 errors http://www.flic...om/nothing-here
The ‘down for maintenance’ message is clearly there to do the following:
1) Discredit Flikr by making them look bad so that yahoo feels pressured into buying the domain.
2) Make users go ‘ahh, this is why the site looks weird/shit’ as opposed to ‘wtf, this aint flikr’
3) Draw traffic (as mentioned in the blog post).
Without this message, I would say that they are dealing in a morally grey area but that they can’t be blamed for capitalising on their ownership of the domain. This message however moves them into the very black area and shows that they have no ethics.
It could be that they are down for maintenance and planning to make other changes.
How could they be trying to capitalize on Yahoo’s site, when the word “flicker” is not only an English word, but the founders of the photo service knew the domain name was not available to them when they started it?
There is nothing at flicker.com that suggests they are trying to make people think it is Yahoo’s site, and they added a bird logo that clearly doesn’t look like anything at Yahoo’s site.
Is it possible that Flickr fans are attacking their site now?
“Flicker is down for maintenance due to recent hacking attack. We will be back shortly.”
Unlikely.
Probably another way to get people to take about the site (while thinking it is flikr that has been hacked).
There is a very easy way for whoever owns this flicker.com domain name to force yahoo to buy it. Just put porn on the site. Then, when people mistakenly go there, they will see porn, and yahoo cannot allow that to happen as it would make them look very bad.