INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
When in April of last year, the photo hosting service SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service Flickr from Verizon digital media
subsidiary, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said he was committed to breathing new life into the service, calling it &core to the entire fabric of
the Internet.&
MacAskill didn&t reveal at the time how much SmugMug — which is itself an independent, family-owned operation — paid for
But it seems now that SmugMug may have underestimated its carrying costs
In an email tonight to users of Flickr who pay roughly $50 annually for the service, MacAskill has basically asked them if they know anyone
else who might be interested in a yearly subscription to Flickr, explaining that it &still needs your help
It still losing money.&
Adds MacAskill, in terms that Flickr fans will surely interpret as acutely worrying, SmugMug &cannot cannot continue
to operate it at a loss as we&ve been doing.& (To sweeten the deal for new subscribers, SmugMug is offering 25% off a Flickr Pro account for
those who visit this link and input the code 25in2019.)
This editor happens to be a Flickr Pro user and shudders to think how many photos
I&d have to move if the service shuts down
At the same time, no one who uses the service can be terribly surprised by the development
Just months after SmugMug acquired Flickr, it curbed free use of the platform to 1,000 pictures per account holder
In fact, it threatened to actively delete the photos of users who did not sign up for a subscription if they exceeded that number.
Beyond
its operating costs, SmugMug, like so many other companies, also found itself engulfed in controversy recently when the New York Times
reported that millions of Flickr images dating back to its 2005 founding had been sucked into a facial-recognition database called MegaFace
to &train a new generation of face-identification algorithms,& &track protesters, surveil terrorists, spot problem gamblers and spy on the
public at large.&
Ben MacAskill, Don brother and the company COO, said at the time that the flaw &potentially impacts a very small number of
our members today, and we are actively working to deploy an update as quickly as possible.& He also noted that the images that had been
accessed pre-dated SmugMug involvement with Flickr by several years.
Either way, it sounds like the future of Flickr — founded by
entrepreneurs Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield in 2004, sold to Yahoo the following year, and later swept into Verizon as part of its
2016 acquisition by Yahoo — is again up in the air
Either more people subscribe to the service, or someone — or some outfit — swoops in to save the day with the capital required to keep
it up and running.
In the worst case scenario, it disappears, along with a whole lot of pictures.
Here the full text of Don MacAskill note
to its customers:
Dear Flickr Pros,
First, and above all else: thank you
Thank you for being a part of our community
Thank you for caring about Flickr
Thank you for supporting Flickr
Thank you for being a Flickr Pro.
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
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 largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand outandfit in.
And yet,
Flickr—the world most-beloved, money-losing business—still needs your help.
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 login
We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology
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.
Flickr still needs your help
You, and hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful
It losing a lot less money than it was
But it not yet making enough.
We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive, and we need your help to share the
story of Flickr.
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 largest photographer-focused community
It the world best way to find great photography and connect with amazing photographers
Flickr hosts some of the world 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 a priceless treasure for the whole world
And it costs money to operate
Lots of money.
As you know, 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,unlimitedfull-qualitystorage for all their photos,
plus premium features and access to the world largest photographer-focused community.
Please, help us spread the word
Help us make Flickr thrive
Help us ensure Flickr 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 give you a coupon
code to share with friends, family, or anyone who shares your love of photography and community so they can enjoy the same 25% discount
before the campaign starts.
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 help everyone upgrade to a Pro membership.
If you value Flickr finally being independent, built for
photographers and by photographers, we need your help.
With gratitude,
Don MacAskill
Co-Founder, CEO - Chief Geek
SmugMug + Flickr
