Yahoo! Photos Vs. Flickr
For all of the hype, all of the bright shiny logos and quirky login greetings, for all the street (or rather, "geek") cred, the fact of the matter is that flickr doesn’t hold a candle to the number of users of Yahoo Photos. Lately, I’ve begun to realize just how many people use Yahoo! Photos. In a week’s time, I’ve seen vacation photos, baby pictures, sonograms, and family pics via Yahoo Photos. Why Yahoo Photos? I’ve asked; the answers include: flickr limits how many you can upload with a free account; I just want to email my photos to my friends; it’s easy; what’s flickr? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the flickr UI over Yahoo Photos any day.
Are you a flickr user, too? Probably, since you know what a blog is and are bothering to read this one. You’re an early adopter; you’re on the bleeding edge of the new web: the Web 2.0. The masses are just learning Web 1.0, and for them Yahoo Photos is enough. They haven’t needed more yet. They don’t see the joy of tagging. They think MySpace is cool! Millions and millions of them. The MySpace crowd is cut-and-pasting HTML code and typing things like <img src =….> to post a photo. (Yes, full disclosure: I’m one of them, but only because I HAVE to.)
Years from now, flickr could be king as the web-handicapped join the communities we’re just now forging. Or maybe not. A message in my Yahoo Photos album tells me the new Yahoo Photos is almost here. Think they took a page from the flickr bag o’ tricks? Of course they did. That was probably the point of the acquisition - new tricks. The new version of Yahoo Photos will bring in tagging, but they’re doing more with it: photo albums will be automatically created for you when multiple pictures have the have the same tag. Useful! The new Yahoo Photos will bring in the community aspect - it will let you see your friends’ public photos on your homepage. Sound familiar? Plus there’s that whole free, unlimited albums thing. I’m not paying to make online photo albums….I’m just not. Sorry, flickr.
Let’s face it. We want to get the most out the Web 2.0 community sites, but a community is only as good as its memberbase. Do we want to revel in our elite unknowns at the risk of segregating our supreme geek selves from the moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas and co-workers and friends in our world? Because, seriously, ask them if they’ve heard of flickr. (It doesn’t count if you’ve told them about it.) Let me know.
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If I’m not a photographer and I use Yahoo Photos, why would I switch to Flickr? And if I’m a Yahoo user who wants to share photos with friends and family, there’s a nice “Photos” link sitting the left hand navigation column of my Yahoo homepage.
Furthermore, you’re Alexa comparisons are completely off the mark. How can you even begin to compare the traffic for all of Yahoo to Flickr? (You may have typed “photos.yahoo.com” into alexa, but alexa doesn’t rank subdomains. So you end up comparing http://www.flickr.com to http://www.yahoo.com). Besides, what you need is information about what new people looking to share photos are chosing. Also, you might be surprised how much branding sways the end user. For example, if I’m completely clueless and I want to share photos, would I be more inclined to go with a service called “Flickr” or “Yahoo Photos”?
Also consider the possibility that conversations don’t usually take place at a website. If the photos are emailed, people can respond privately & securly. You’re not publishing your thoughts to the world. Flickr, on the otherhand, is fantastic for photographers wishing to solicit feedback about their photos or people with blogs (since they’re commenters don’t mind publishing their comments).
To really answer your question, you need to dig deep and research how people are using photos online, and what they’re primary concerns are (eg. privacy).
Unless a company steps up and offers a new simple solution to a problem or completely reinvents the game, it’s going to be impossible to scale to the mass market. Consider YouTube - they’ve got a ridiculous amount of traffic by making video sharing easy. Then consider Gmail. Gmail is great for the elite, but hotmail’s been around for ages. Friends in my software engineering program still use hotmail, and we’re supposedly at the very bleeding edge of technology.
I honestly question the value many “Web 2.0″ companies out there. It’s funny - whenever people talk about successful Web 2.0 companies, they keep mentioning good old Flickr, Digg, Delicious. YouTube seems to be the only newcomer in my mind.
Also, you may want to follow Netscape experiment, where they’re forcing social news on their mainstream media audience.
You’ve got a fantastic blog here, by the way.
P.S. Why do you _have to_ have a MySpace account?
This is why I shouldn’t post after 2 beers. I didn’t even realize that alexa returned yahoo.com instead of photos.yahoo.com. Crap. I’m re-editing the post. Thanks for the comment.
I’m with you on all of this. Good post.
There is something to be said about a smaller, more focused user base, though, and it’s not just the aren’t-we-cool factor. The signal to noise ratio is lower, so it’s easier to participate and find your niche. I know companies have to grow and change to survive, but for now I love that flickr is not only easy to use but also has a good percentage of people who are serious about showing and improving their photography.
Good point, Joolie
Thanks for the info…been using yahoo photos for about 4 years and was looking for a better way to massively upload approx 2,000 pictures that have been sitting around for approx 3+ years and share with photo shows etc… Flickr may be the next step in my ‘evolution’.
Take care.