Goodbye Yahoo Photos; Yahoo Loves Flickr More

TechCrunch and USA Today have news that Yahoo is to close its popular Yahoo Photos service completely in the coming months, telling people to either switch to Flickr or leave to a number of other competing photo sharing services.

From USA Today:

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."

Wow. Pretty big gamble. I know plenty of people who upload photos not to be social in the Flickr sense but instead because it’s a convenient way to share them with a small number of friends and family. They are social as much as it is social to shove prints in an envelope and send them to someone you know.

USA Today has stats showing that Yahoo Photos has slipped according to
Hitwise in terms of share of the usage of photo sites.
Photobucket (recently

profiled in Fortune as "the biggest web site you’ve never heard of" has a 25
percent share in April 2006, followed by Yahoo Photos at 14.4 percent. In April
2007, Photobucket had climbed to 40 percent. Yahoo Photos was still second, but
with a drop to 5.7 percent. Flickr was further back at fourth, at 4.5 percent.

TechCrunch has different figures from comScore showing Yahoo Photos as the
most popular photo sharing site with 31.1 million unique visitors worldwide,
followed just behind by Flickr at 28.5 million. Add those together, and the 60
million combined visitors (assuming most use only one or the other service)
would easily dwarf Photobucket’s 28 million.

Therein lies another reason to simply kill Yahoo Photos. If a huge chunk of
the people move over, Yahoo will leapfrog above the competition (according to
comScore figures), giving it bragging rights during a year when it has come
under fire for perceived failures by Wall Street to grow search traffic or grow
revenues more of the new Panama ad system.

TechCrunch reports that the change will happen over the coming months and
that those who don’t want to use Flickr will be able to go to other services:

Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr – instead, users are being given
the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a
current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your
photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a
few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly.
Most of these services have built special tools to transition users,
Butterfield said. Users will also be able to download full sized original
photos, or order CDs and prints at a discount to the normal price. “We have no
interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr” Butterfield said. “We want
happy users.”

I’m impressed that Yahoo will support the ability to export to so many
services but also amazed at the possible stupidity here. How difficult can it be
to maintain a rudimentary Yahoo Photos service for those who like what they
have. If you need to combine the traffic into Flickr, just switch to using a
Flickr domain. Don’t promote it any longer; don’t add features to it, sure. But
kill it? You want happy users? I suspect a few million aren’t going to be happy
at all — and they’re going to be walking over to Yahoo competitors.

Some more stupidity. I know the perception is that Yahoo Photos is used by
grandmas barely able to run a computer. I know Flickr is the hot, hip, AJAXY
taggy Web 2.0 future. And I’m absolutely a loyal and loving Flickr use. But I
expect there are plenty of loyal Yahoo Photo users as well, ones that would have
liked to have learned about this radical change from Yahoo directly, rather than
when reading their morning paper.

Instead, there’s nothing at the Yahoo Photos site telling you this is coming.
Nada. The Flickr Blog had squat, too.

Lastly, TechCrunch notes that Flickr is finally getting over its "we can’t do
video" fear and will allow video uploads in the future. Good. So many people
shoot short video clips with the same digital cameras that they use for images
that this move is long overdue.

For more discussion, see the
recap at Techmeme.

Postscript: Yahoo Photos now has a FAQ about the closure up here. Of course, when I log into Yahoo Photos, it’s ironic that I see this:

That big “The new Yahoo! Photos will be here shortly” button points to this News.com article covering the closed beta that I guess is going to stay closed forever now.