Videos on Flickr is a bad idea

By Aditya Mhatre at 10 January, 2009, 6:05 am

A few days back Yahoo Flickr announced that all users will be allowed to upload videos on Flickr. Until recently, only pro users had the ability to upload videos on the photo sharing website. Flickr’s contention is that many people record videos using their digital cameras or cell phones and wanted to provide these users the ability to upload such videos on Flickr. hmmm.. there is one issue that I have with this. Flickr is a photo sharing website!

This move is wrong on so many levels that its difficult for me to resist pulling my hair out. Just because the device used to record videos is the same as the device used to take photos does not mean that Flickr should go for it. There is a very fundamental difference between an image and a series of moving images. It’s just not the same. Moreover, Flickr is said to be still loosing a lot of money on flickr. If I am not wrong, Leo Laporte had quoted a figure as high as $1MN a month on Twit. If that is true then adding videos is going to cause an even bigger whole in Yahoo’s dwindling wallet. Also, why is Flickr’s sanctity being disturbed when they already have Yahoo Videos as a seperate offering is beyond me.

But as I said on Tech Ka Masala, I am not the one to bitch. I have a business proposition for Flickr. Flickr has a very strong pro user community who have fantastic photo collections on Flickr. Flickr could provide these pro users a feature to sell their photos via Flickr. The way I see it working is something like this. A pro users is given an option to set a price for each photo that they wish to sell and Yahoo can make money in micro transactional fees just like Apple does with iPhone Apps. Since this would also give an opportunity to the user to make back the pro user account charges that he paid, Yahoo might see an increase in the number of people signing up for the pro user accounts. Voila! (that would be $50K as my business consulting fees, thank you very much!).

I have an affinity towards Yahoo because it was the first website that I logged on to back in 1993 when I accessed the internet for the very first time and hate to see it make such an amateur mistake.

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Categories : Technology