Yahoo’s Irving: “Hell Yes” Yahoo Is Committed To Flickr

Yahoo Product Chief Blake Irving just tweeted a ringing endorsement of Flickr, the company’s photo sharing site/community.

Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.

The tweet is no doubt a response to questions earlier this week about Flickr’s profitability and the possibility that Yahoo might shutter it (as other Yahoo properties apparently will be shuttered).

Long-time Flickr user Thomas Hawk took a stab yesterday at estimating how much money Flickr brings in for Yahoo, and after using what I’d call some questionable numbers, came up with about $50 million per year — small change for a company of Yahoo’s size, especially considering the costs of running a website with more than 5 billion photos. ReadWriteWeb followed Hawk’s article with one of its own that asked if Flickr might someday land on Yahoo’s chopping block.

Cal Henderson, former Director of Engineering at Flickr, responded in the comments on ReadWriteWeb that Hawk’s calculations “are deeply flawed,” and pointed out that Flickr gets a substantial portion of its revenue not from selling Pro accounts, but from ads and other partnerships.

Between Henderson’s refuting of the post that started the discussion, and Irving’s tweet this afternoon, it would seem that Flickr users can breathe easy for the time being.