Flickr.com is of course the huge photo sharing site owned by Yahoo.
However, Yahoo does not own the .com for the proper spelling of the word, which is Flicker.com
Flicker.com, in a pretty rare move, recently posted it traffic stats on its home page along with click through rates and the stats are pretty impressive.
According to Flicker.com “by the numbers”, they receive:
Source:
Direct Navigation (95.74%)
Outbound Clicks:
400K /per yr
CPC Keyword Values:
(Photography equipment)
$2.50 -$3.00 /click
Daily Value to Advertisers:
$2700.00 – $3300.00
According to those numbers Flicker.com, could generate somewhere around $100K in revenue a month, if Yahoo bought the domain and just sold ads on it.
Or of course Yahoo could also point that traffic to its Flickr.com site.
According to Compete.com, Flickr is the 31st busiest site on the net, getting almost 27M visitors a month.
So the question is wouldn’t it be worth it for Yahoo’s to buy the domain Flicker.com, to add and protect one of its most valuable properties?
The huge tech blog Mashable, asked this same question a couple of years ago when the owners of the domain flicker.com reportedly turned down an offer of $350K for the domain but then the traffic seems to have only been half of what it is now.
However now there is more than traffic at stake.
For example on the social networking site, Twitter, Flicker.com has an account with the description “Official Flicker on Twitter“, has 438 followers, while Flickr has on Twitter the “Official Flickr Twitter page” only 873 followers.
One can also ask how did a public company the site of Yahoo find get itself into this position.
According to a post on 90percentofeverthing.com, the story goes that when the founders of Flickr, decided on naming their photo sharing site, “Flicker” they found the domain was taken and the then owner did not want to sell. So instead, they went with a typo, a Web 2.0 domain, Flickr.com. In 2005 Yahoo purchased the company that owned Flickr.com for an undisclosed amount.
According to allthingsdigital.com blog, Yahoo is expected to announce a “Major Brand Revamp” as early as next week.
So the question needs to be asked again, why doesn’t Yahoo just buy Flicker.com?
Ecstatic numbers! Outbound clicks 11%, where’s the other 89%? Flicker.com can see 100K/month, Y! could see 1M/month.
I’m wondering how many visitors does it take Yahoo!(tm) to convert on their Flickr.com site vs traffic from Flicker.com?1000:1 vs 10:1?
It seems like a “No-Brainer” buy to me, but it always comes down to money. My guess is that Yahoo! made the $350K offer in the past and that’s what they were willing to spend on the domain.
3.6M a year traffic is great, but 27M a month is much better. Do they miss the 75K a month that likely find the Flickr.com site anyway?
I like how Flicker.com is hiding it’s Ad URL’s with Bit.ly links. 🙂
This story has now been picked up by TechCrunch:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/flicker-no-not-that-one-bares-its-stats-in-an-attempt-to-get-rich/
However they did not credit thedomains.com as being the source of the story, well at least I know there reading
I don’t have any insider info on what Yahoo! is planning, but they screwed up for years by acquiring these great web apps and NOT integrating them into Yahoo!
The longer you wait to integrate a successful web app into your brand, the harder it is to swallow the pain of re-branding that service. Google made the same mistake with YouTube and Google Video, although that would have been a very painful pill to swallow at the time (YouTube having grown so virally on such a great, “essential” domain name).
Now that Yahoo! is seriously reconsidering its existence, I would not be surprised to see them rebrand Flickr as a Yahoo! photo/image property. The same thinking could explain the release of Contests.com.
If Yahoo! is to be relevant once again, known more for its successes than its failures (as Yahoo!), and if Yahoo! wants to invest for forward-looking media brand value, it doesn’t need Flicker.com
John
You really suggest that Yahoo should rebrand the 31st busiest site on the net from Flickr to Yahoo photo/image?
Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue does it?
no no no I don’t presume to do their branding but yes, I would not be surprised if they rebranded things around the Yahoo! media brand. Hopefully, they do it better than that suggestion!
BTW, I think you have to consider that Flickr (the service) is well known by a very small percentage of the population that is expected to be using web for photosharing over the next 10 years. They needed that Flickr brand following so they could grow to be stable/entrenched. Do they still need it? Is Picassa known because of Picassa branding or Google affiliation?
My Dad started with Kodak Online because of an ad on the envelope from the last set of prints he got from the camera store. He’s still never heard of “Flicker”, but knows (and has used) Picassa because he uses Google.
Yahoo! has far greater reach than Flickr, and ambition.
John
I understand what your saying but I just don’t agree with the idea of screwing by re-branding something that is working, in which case I think they need to buy Flicker.com, not so much for the traffic value, as its only fraction of flickr, but so that they can continue to build the brand
one day they will buy for sure
Based on my experience, Flickr actually is not a great way to share photos with family and friends – it’s much worse than Yahoo Photos used to be. The main problem is that it’s not easy to share a group of photos without creating a permanent, separate “set.” For those who like to send around groups of photos, the number of “sets” you need to create quickly gets too large, and they become unmanageable.
Flickr should allow you to use Organizr to create a group of photos and send them using Yahoo Mail, without having to create a permanent set. This would make the service a lot more useful for sharing purposes.
Having said this, you can work around this problem by installing the Flickr application from within Yahoo Mail. That application isn’t as easy to use as Organizr, but it does allow you to send groups of photos without creating a permanent set.
Ha, we already know the end of the story now… 🙂