Photographs are one of the most important elements in our day to day. Everyone is capable of taking great photos with the advancements in the lenses and sensors of our devices. Flickr was born as a photographers social network for photographers. In 2018 it had to be bought by the SmugMug company, an image hosting company, due to the constant losses it was suffering. A few hours ago, Flickr appealed for users to subscribe to Flickr Pro or the company would face closure due to large losses of money and lack of liquidity.
'Flickr deserves not only to live but to prosper'
In 2018, SmugMug bought Flickr and made countless improvements such as taking all content to the Amazon Web Services servers or completely eliminating access by Yahoo! All the advances and improvements established since the arrival of the new CEO have served to improve the social network. Nevertheless, the money losses are too high to maintain Flickr. And this is a problem. In a paper written for users, the current CEO assures that they bought Flickr because they love photography and it would be a mistake to lose tens of billions of images hosted on the social network.
No compramos Flickr porque pensamos que era una forma de hacer dinero. A diferencia de plataformas como Facebook, tampoco lo compramos para invadir su privacidad y vender sus datos. Lo compramos porque amamos a los fotógrafos, amamos la fotografía y creemos que Flickr merece no solo vivir sino prosperar. Creemos que el mundo está de acuerdo; y creemos que la comunidad de Flickr también lo hace. Pero no podemos continuar operando con pérdidas como lo hemos estado haciendo.
The letter is a call for help to the loyal users who continue to enjoy the social network every day. They ask for the Flickr Pro subscription which is priced at $ 5 a month. This subscription allows you to browse without ads, advanced statistics, unlimited storage of maximum quality, and premium features and access to the largest photography community in the world. In the letter, they say that if we are willing to pay more than $ 9 for services such as Spotify or Netflix, why not invest in taking care of photography?
Es probable que pague servicios como Netflix y Spotify al menos con 9 dólares al mes. Me encantan estos servicios, y soy un cliente que paga feliz, pero no mantienen seguras sus invaluables fotos y le permiten compartirlas con las personas más importantes de su mundo. Flickr sí, y una suscripción de Flickr Pro cuesta menos de 1 dólar a la semana.
So yeah it's clear that yes Flickr does not achieve the necessary liquidity to stay it is very likely that in a few months they will have to close and all the photographic culture that has been stored since its creation in 2004 may be lost. And you? Will you buy a membership to store all your photos?