Is Flickr circling the drain

Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year. Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being shut down and to save tens of billions of your precious photos from being erased.

Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly building our company into a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by and watch Flickr vanish.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in.

We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. We hired an excellent, large staff of Support Heroes who now deliver support with an average customer satisfaction rating of above 90%. We got rid of Yahoo’s login. We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.

Our work is never done, but we’ve made tremendous progress.

Now Flickr needs your help. It’s still losing money. Hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful. It’s losing a lot less money than it was. But it’s not yet making enough.

We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive.

We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We think the world agrees; and we think the Flickr community does, too. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.

Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Lots of money.

Flickr is not a charity, and we’re not asking you for a donation. Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the world. Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community for less than $5 per month.

You likely pay services such as Netflix and Spotify at least $9 per month. I love services like these, and I’m a happy paying customer, but they don’t keep your priceless photos safe and let you share them with the most important people in your world. Flickr does, and a Flickr Pro membership costs less than $1 per week.

Please, help us make Flickr thrive. Help us ensure it has a bright future. Every Flickr Pro subscription goes directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday, December 26, but I want to invite you to subscribe to Flickr Pro today for the same 25% discount.

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small price increase early in the new year, so this is truly the very best time to upgrade your membership to Pro.

If you value Flickr finally being independent, built for photographers and by photographers, we ask you to join us, and to share this offer with those who share your love of photography and community.

With gratitude,

Don MacAskill
Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek
SmugMug + Flickr

Use and share coupon code 25in2019 to get 25% off Flickr Pro now.

Join Pro now
Your use of Flickr is subject to the Flickr Terms & Conditions of Use and Community Guidelines

View in browser | Unsubscribe
2019 Flickr, P.O. Box 390123, Mountain View, CA 94039

1337

Flickr doesn't make sense in a world full of smartphones and visual overload.
They need to find another business model but that is unlikely so they will probably just wither away and die a quiet death in obscurity.

Obsolesce

A big QQ email IMO.

scottalanmiller

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

Flickr doesn't make sense in a world full of smartphones and visual overload.

What about it do you feel doesn't make sense? For photographers, what's really competing with it? I don't see how smartphones affect the need.

Flickr's real problem I think is in that they offer free services when they are really designed around pros.

scottalanmiller

I just got the email this morning.

Emad R

@JaredBusch said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@JaredBusch odd, nothing has come in to me.

It’s a beg for money so if you’re a pro subscriber you probably didn’t get it

Speaking of which do you Americans see this

when you visit any Wiki page, cause i didn't see it when I lived in Jordan. And im Curios if Wiki thing Americans are generous and nice like us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Thug

coliver

@Emad-R said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@JaredBusch said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@JaredBusch odd, nothing has come in to me.

It’s a beg for money so if you’re a pro subscriber you probably didn’t get it

Speaking of which do you Americans see this

when you visit any Wiki page, cause i didn't see it when I lived in Jordan. And im Curios if Wiki thing Americans are generous and nice like us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Thug

Yes. I need to donate thanks for reminding me.

travisdh1

@Emad-R said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@JaredBusch said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@JaredBusch odd, nothing has come in to me.

It’s a beg for money so if you’re a pro subscriber you probably didn’t get it

Speaking of which do you Americans see this

when you visit any Wiki page, cause i didn't see it when I lived in Jordan. And im Curios if Wiki thing Americans are generous and nice like us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Thug

This is something wikipedia does every year. It's how they raise all the funding to run the website, and only for a few days each year.

Yeah, only 2% of people who see that actually donate, but it's enough that they continue to operate. I'd say it's effective enough.

Now I need to go throw a donation there way myself.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

Flickr doesn't make sense in a world full of smartphones and visual overload.

What about it do you feel doesn't make sense? For photographers, what's really competing with it? I don't see how smartphones affect the need.

Flickr's real problem I think is in that they offer free services when they are really designed around pros.

agreed, the free service should be something like 5 GB of storage, or less...

1337

@Dashrender said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

Flickr doesn't make sense in a world full of smartphones and visual overload.

What about it do you feel doesn't make sense? For photographers, what's really competing with it? I don't see how smartphones affect the need.

Flickr's real problem I think is in that they offer free services when they are really designed around pros.

agreed, the free service should be something like 5 GB of storage, or less...

The problem is that they built flickr when everyone and their uncle had a dSLR and was an amateur photographer. Back when newspapers still had photographers on staff. When the world was different. So their potential user base was huge.

Today people use instagram to post their images or snapshat or whatever. They don't need anything that flickr offers and don't care. Those that still care and have other needs are a tiny minority that get smaller and smaller each day. So yes, if they change their business model they could survive as a small niche operator. Similar to how Tri-X and HP5 have survived.

Dashrender

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@Dashrender said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

Flickr doesn't make sense in a world full of smartphones and visual overload.

What about it do you feel doesn't make sense? For photographers, what's really competing with it? I don't see how smartphones affect the need.

Flickr's real problem I think is in that they offer free services when they are really designed around pros.

agreed, the free service should be something like 5 GB of storage, or less...

The problem is that they built flickr when everyone and their uncle had a dSLR and was an amateur photographer. Back when newspapers still had photographers on staff. When the world was different. So their potential user base was huge.

Today people use instagram to post their images or snapshat or whatever. They don't need anything that flickr offers and don't care. Those that still care and have other needs are a tiny minority that get smaller and smaller each day. So yes, if they change their business model they could survive as a small niche operator. Similar to how Tri-X and HP5 have survived.

Good points - what is Tri-X and HP5? seriously, what are they?

but, as you said - Flickr is basically dead to the general public... they need to kick people like my wife off their service - she has two accounts, because she was unwilling to pay for more storage for the first. Which reminds me.. time to pull those pictures out of there and into google.

1337

@Dashrender said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@Dashrender said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

Flickr doesn't make sense in a world full of smartphones and visual overload.

What about it do you feel doesn't make sense? For photographers, what's really competing with it? I don't see how smartphones affect the need.

Flickr's real problem I think is in that they offer free services when they are really designed around pros.

agreed, the free service should be something like 5 GB of storage, or less...

The problem is that they built flickr when everyone and their uncle had a dSLR and was an amateur photographer. Back when newspapers still had photographers on staff. When the world was different. So their potential user base was huge.

Today people use instagram to post their images or snapshat or whatever. They don't need anything that flickr offers and don't care. Those that still care and have other needs are a tiny minority that get smaller and smaller each day. So yes, if they change their business model they could survive as a small niche operator. Similar to how Tri-X and HP5 have survived.

Good points - what is Tri-X and HP5? seriously, what are they?

but, as you said - Flickr is basically dead to the general public... they need to kick people like my wife off their service - she has two accounts, because she was unwilling to pay for more storage for the first. Which reminds me.. time to pull those pictures out of there and into google.

Tri-X and HP5 are two legendary fast black and white negative films. The technology that made handheld photography possible and defined the photojournalism genre.

At one time it was something you could pick up in almost any store and something that every photographer used on a daily basis. Today it's a very small niche product for mostly street photographers and artists.

So it survived the onslaught of color photography, the obliteration of film in favor of digital photography as well as the entire smartphone photography revolution. But the market share went from 100% to 0.001% in the process.

scottalanmiller

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

Tri-X and HP5 are two legendary fast black and white negative films. The technology that made handheld photography possible and defined the photojournalism genre.

I'm younger, it was T-Max primarily for me. I was one of the few people with the facilities and training to be able to develop T-Max 3200 because one mistake meant everything was blown out.

JaredBusch

@Dashrender said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

Which reminds me.. time to pull those pictures out of there and into google.

That was sarcasm right?