Flickr has been sold after 13 years at Yahoo. Can Flickr be relevant again? - Recode: Verizon, its current owner via its Oath subsidiary, has sold Flickr to SmugMug, an even older, subscription-based photo sharing service, as reported first by USA Today’s Jessica Guynn.
SmugMug’s founder and CEO Don MacAskill has taken to Twitter to talk up his hopes for the deal. “We will move heaven and earth to thrill you and photographers everywhere,” he told one Flickr Pro user.
If MacAskill can engage the most serious of remaining Flickr users — the site reportedly has “more than 100 million unique users who post tens of billions of photos” — it’s easy to see how the deal could be lucrative for SmugMug, which has long successfully operated in the small-but-profitable model.
And long-time Flickr fans sound excited at the news. Yahoo, to be sure, was a mostly bad owner; it’s sort of a miracle Flickr still exists.
SmugMug’s founder and CEO Don MacAskill has taken to Twitter to talk up his hopes for the deal. “We will move heaven and earth to thrill you and photographers everywhere,” he told one Flickr Pro user.
If MacAskill can engage the most serious of remaining Flickr users — the site reportedly has “more than 100 million unique users who post tens of billions of photos” — it’s easy to see how the deal could be lucrative for SmugMug, which has long successfully operated in the small-but-profitable model.
And long-time Flickr fans sound excited at the news. Yahoo, to be sure, was a mostly bad owner; it’s sort of a miracle Flickr still exists.