Recall my musings about if Flickr will move towards stock photography features? Looks like they are definitely at least considering it …
Making Money For The Flickr Flock?
He called subscriptions one of the “core ways” Flickr will make money in the future.
He also said that there were other opportunities, such as brand advertising, contextual ads, search ads and, well, then he stopped short.
“We don’t talk about upcoming initiatives,” he said. “But I will say that even today, a lot of people buy photos from Flickr users. But people have to know the person, and send them a Flickr mail and they have to negotiate a price.
“It’s a very high-friction process. Taking the friction out of that would be one of things Flickr could do to monetize,” he said. “But we haven’t made any announcements.”
But he went into details.
First off, Butterfield said, Flickr photos wouldn’t be the same product that photo buyers find on a stock photo site like Jupiterimages or even iStockphoto, which is a kind of Flickr for professionals known for its “crowd-sourcing.”
Butterfield said those sites typically trade in typical business brochure-friendly photos. For instance, he added, they would sell an image of a group of ethnically diverse 40- and 30-somethings using computers or maybe of two men shaking hands.
Flickr photos would find a different niche on the marketplace, but still a viable one, he added. And then it begins to make sense. Flickr photos are typically more, personal, more artistic.
When I gave Butterfield my card, he saw that I worked for JupiterWeb, which shares a parent company with Jupiterimages.
“Ah,” he said, “Jupiter, No. 3 in the business.”
Before the interview ended, I pointed out that iStockphoto already has a good 23,000 contributing photographers.
That’s when Butterfield reminded me of Flickr’s 4 million.
Not everyone is happy about it, there are several pro and anti conversations taking place on Flickr groups right now. I for one welcome the move if it keeps Flickr running, they can’t survive on subscriptions alone can they?
Technorati Tags: flickr, stock, photography, news
One Comment
Flickr has no problems.
I suggest that those who worry about keeping a popular community site alive read about the success of Craigslist and see how little he needs to keep that going. The fact is that this site would not need a large staff to keep it going. However, the chance of monetizing the users pictures is a significant cash flow addition possibility. the operator of Craig’s list has repeatedly indicated that he could obtain a much larger cash flow. If he departed from his user-friendly model, however, he would have to take a road other than choosing to keep the staff small and customer satisfaction high.
Flickr is worrying about making more money, not keeping afloat.