The buzz in photography circles this past weekend was a post by Thomas Hawk declaring “Flickr is Dead.” It’s not the first time we’ve heard this attention-grabbing headline. By the numbers, it’s hard to call a photo sharing site with more than 5 billion photos “dead” just yet, and Hawk admits it will take time. But, Yahoo-owned Flickr is facing increasing competition and influential photographers are choosing to upload elsewhere.
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Hawk’s article has generated some good discussion on his blog, Hacker News and Google+. Commentors pointed out that Hawk has 60,000 photos in his Flickr photostream which appears to the right of his “Flickr is Dead” post. But that just shows someone like Hawk, who is clearly a power user of Flickr, is not happy. He’s the type of paying “Pro” user Flickr needs to keep.
A commenter named Jolene compared Flickr to an ex-beau. “It’s still out there… you remember how much in love you once were, how you thought it was going to be forever. Eventually, you grew apart.”
I read the post by Thomas Hawk (aka Andrew Peterson) this weekend and completely disagree. I think this is just Andrew’s way of calling things dead way in advance so he gets credit for it. I see his concerns and they’re not baseless but there’s some really important perspective here. Apple may not innovate for years, but if the iPod is still 90% of the market and dropping a 10% each year, it doesn’t mean they’re on the way out. There’s still roughly another decade of dominance. It’s going to take a lot of luck and innovation to kill Flickr and most photographers aren’t Andrew. Most are not early adopters. They adopt something and stick around for a while. You’d have to do a lot of leg work and Yahoo! would have to screw up a lot more for most pro photographers to leave Flickr. MG Siegler’s comparison of Flick stats showing the dominance of iPhone is the only thing that makes me think Flickr may be in trouble. If most photo uploads are iPhones, then those users tend to switch services early and often. Personally though, I wouldn’t mind one bit if every iPhone picture disappeared from Flickr tomorrow. Make it SLR only and you’ll see a huge jump in quality. Most camera phone people don’t take part in the Flickr community anyway. Good riddance.
Andrew is just trying to call an early death and I think he’s too emotionally tied up in the future of Flickr to give sound reasoning here. I love his work and love his contributions to photography but Andrew and Yahoo’s relationship is VERY rocky and full of emotion. Flickr isn’t going anywhere very fast. That’s just my opinion.