Is Flickr Over Yahoo! a Victory?

Some of the big news today circles around the pending shuttering of the Yahoo! Photos site. Yahoo! Photos, wth its 2B photos, will be giving users of the service the option to migrate to its other photo property, Flickr (currently stacking about 500M photos). Interestingly, this is not a required migration path and instead Yahoo! also offers a variety on exit ramps to patrons including export to Photobucket and Snapfish.

Many in the Web 2.0 universe consider this a huge win for Flickr. I'm not so sure about that, and it's even much less a guarantee for the Web 2.0 thinking in my book. I think the fact that there isn't an instant migration to Flickr speaks to the power, and challenge, of establishing communities online. Ben Metcalfe has more:

And this is where the rub lies for the Yahoo! Photo users who are now contemping their options. Yahoo! does run a conceptually similar service, Flickr, however it is wildly different in it’s dynamic. Quite frankly many of the photos, and their owners, from Yahoo! Photos would not be welcome in Flickr’s high-quality, open, community-orientated environment.

Yahoo! has enough smart people to realize this and so it is for that reason they have turned down the otherwise lucrative opportunity of simply merging all those photos into Flickr to create the biggest photo site on the net (2.5bn photos).

Source: Ben Metcalfe Blog, “When your assets are no longer monetizable: Yahoo! Photos to close”

I think that the victor here is Flickr. I agree with Ben that Flickr’s ability to capture customers that love the service enough to part ways with their hard earned cash is the leading motivation. I believe the focus on the customer is certainly a tenet of Web 2.0. However, another tactical hallmark of this new suite of applications is the ad-driven revenue model. To that end, I think this move should serve as a serious wake-up call to the peril of building real, lasting value (the kind people pay for with more than just their time) early.

As a side note, I used Yahoo! Photos for the first time in a long time recently to order prints. It was a really easy experience and one that is not matched by Flickr’s. Hopefully more of it will be integrated.

Technorati Tags: flickr, media+sharing, ben+metcalfe, web2.0, yahoo