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Yahoo Photos to Go Dark As Flickr's Growth Shines On

Posted on: Friday, 4 May 2007, 06:00 CDT

By Jefferson Graham

LOS ANGELES -- At Yahoo, Web 2.0 has won one battle with stodgy old Web 1.0.

Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Photos -- for years, the No. 1 or No. 2 most-visited photo site on the Web. Its users will be directed to move their pictures to Yahoo's hot upstart, Flickr.

Flickr, acquired by Yahoo in March 2005, has steadily gained traction. Visitors rose 22% between April 2006 and April 2007, according to measurement service Hitwise. At the same time, Yahoo Photos lost 60% of its audience.

In its heyday, Yahoo Photos was such a go-to place for photo-sharing that more than 2 billion images are stored on its servers, to nearly 500 million for Flickr.

Yahoo Photos will be shut down by the fall. Users will be directed over a three-month period to transfer their images to Flickr or other photo sites such as Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery or Photobucket. Yahoo says it will make the transition easy, with a one-click transfer process.

Yahoo has said that it kept both services going after the acquisition because they appealed to different audiences. But Thursday, it said in a statement that Yahoo Photos was closing because of the changing nature of the Internet.

Digital photography has evolved "into a social activity that allows people to communicate and connect," Yahoo said. "We have decided to shift our focus accordingly."

Yahoo Photos is a static photo-sharing site, with links to offers to buy prints and accessories. Flickr is a social community, like MySpace and YouTube, where members can search through photos and comment on them.

Charlene Li, an analyst with market tracker Forrester Research, says Yahoo needed to make the change because photos on Yahoo couldn't be tracked in search engines.

On Flickr, users have the tools to add information to images to make them searchable.

Li thinks many Yahoo Photos users will be upset about the move. "People don't like change," she says. But Yahoo had no choice, she says.

Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Flickr in 2004 with wife Caterina Fake, says the move is a "validation" of the central idea of Flickr: that photos in the digital age are very different from a physical print.

"We saw it as a means of communication and connecting with people," says Butterfield, Flickr's general manager. "People can take a picture and get immediate feedback from all over the world, and you can't do that with a printed photo."

Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Hitwise, says he doesn't expect many Yahoo Photos users to move to Flickr, because it's an older, more entrenched audience. "Yahoo will be successful transitioning some of the users, but certainly not all of them," he says. (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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