Flickr Pro Users To Lose Historical Referrer Data Tomorrow

If you’re a Flickr Pro user, you have about 24 hours to download the historical stats and referrer data associated with your photos. CSV and/or Excel files are available via your stats page until 12:00 pm PDT tomorrow, June 1st. You’ll see a yellow warning message like the one below, with a direct link to the download page:

After tomorrow’s deadline, Pro users will only be able to access photo stats dating back 28 days.

Flickr has gone back and forth with its Pro members on this issue. Historical referrer data has come and gone, and in early March, Flickr first announced that the historical data was available again, but warned of the June 1st deadline. A section of the Flickr help pages offers something close to an apology and explanation why the historical data is going away:

We promised you access to your all time data, and we’re disappointed we’ve not been able to deliver on that. We’ve been trying for over a year to get the data ready for you and in the process we have found that it’s just not sustainable for us to offer this access over the long term. What’s available is what we have managed to generate so far, it’s offered as is with no guarantees. We know it’s missing some data but fixing the holes or offering the data for longer would require us to divert too much attention from making the rest of the site better which, as always, is our main goal.

A Yahoo spokesperson clarified the above for us, saying, “creating and maintaining the files are processor and time intensive, requiring too much ongoing support.”

For businesses and individuals that rely on Flickr as part of an overall marketing strategy, this is an inconvenience at minimum. It’s also something of a warning flag that a company of Yahoo’s stature doesn’t have the resources to maintain historical stats for its paid Flickr members.