Still looking like a plane crash
"Imagine that you buy a ticket over the internet for a flight from London to New York. When you get to the airport however, a perky smiling check in person informs you that the flight plan has been changed and your seat assignment has been changed to the huge cargo bay of a C-130. The good news is the you will have plenty of leg room, for more than you could ever need. Besides that, your ticket price has doubled for reasons unknown. It is complicated by turbulence and having to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with other confused passengers in tubular aluminum webbed seats. The cargo bay is stacked in the middle with lost baggage and is almost impossible to navigate around when trying to find the toilet, which turns out to be a large industrial-looking funnel behind a curtain, (which still has no paper). The entire experience is a mess. When you do manage to yell over the engines loud enough to alert a flight attendant, they deliver blithe assertions on the "incredible upside" to flying in a massive C-130 cargo bay for more money than in a Boeing 737, and anyway the flight attendant says, flying commercial airliners is a thing of the past – didn’t you know that??"
"Dear Flickr, It takes real guts to admit when one is wrong. You are putting up a tremendous effort to make the new layout work, but it is appalling. I have too many photos on the site to up and leave, I feel completely trapped, it would take me years to upload 20,000 onto another site. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE go back to the old layout. This continues to be a living nightmare. At a glance viewing of my whole site via sets is now impossible, I have hundreds of them, and thats just one of the probs, oh please, I beg of you guys to give us the old layout as an alternative?"
Just two quotes of the 1000's that I've read over the past weeks.
If you currently have a Pro account:
You can continue to have ad-free browsing for $25 per year.
People who visit your pages will not see ads
You will still see your stats
You will have unlimited upload and storage.
If you let your pro expire:
Visitors to your pages will see ads.
You are limited to 1 Tb of storage
You will see ads when you use Flickr
You will not have stats.
If you change your mind:
You can pay $50 per year for ad-free browsing.
You cannot get stats
You cannot get unlimited storage
You cannot stop Flickr from placing ads on your pages.
The redesigned interface was not adequately thought through or thoroughly focus-group tested. It didn't undergo adequate technical testing. It was sprung upon your customers with no notification and without adequate documentation and support. A service provider that treats their paying customers in this manner does not deserve their business.
But do Flickr really want paying customers anymore?
Yes, but by and large I'm sure Yahoo does not care if some Pro members leave. It sort of depends on a user by user case, but many Pro accounts are likely unprofitable to Yahoo. Storage is expensive. There are certainly a number of Pro accounts that are likely profitable, but these are your power Pro prestige kind of high traffic drawing accounts (think President Obama, Trey Ratcliff, Miss Aniela, type accounts).
The longer a Pro member is with you the more photos they have, the more storage they use, the more expensive they are. What's more, $24.99 is a pretty low cost to opt out of ads. This means that ads on Flickr were largely a for the few. All the people that advertisers really wanted to advertise to were the Pro accounts and they couldn't. But $50 a year is a higher hurdle to pay. Where a lot of people would pay $24.99, a lot less will pay $50. Also, without the 200 photo limit anymore there is even less of an incentive to pay to upgrade. I'm sure that the new $50 sign ups will end up having less a lot less take up. So with more having the free account which Flickr previously couldn't advertise to, will now become part of the demographic make up to sell to advertisers going forward. This means that there will be many more users with disposable income on Flickr for advertisers. Thus Flickr will be able to charge significantly higher CPVs (cost per thousand views), for adverts than they can today.
The new $500 pricing for a second terabyte also discourages the totally unprofitable account that just loads Flickr up for the next 30 years. Yahoo probably considered just dropping Pro altogether but realized that many of the most important content producers (also important) on Flickr were Pro. So by giving these folks an option to grandfather in, it may stop them from leaving. They also reward their most active users by letting them have the Pro perk. A lot of the Pros complaining in the forums. Does Flickr care if you go to ipernity, 500px? Unlikely...
There's a reason why Facebook paid a billion for Instagram and why Google is spending hundreds of millions of dollars focusing on images with Google+. To remain sustainable Flickr knows how important images are to the future of any internet business. Letting people opt out of ads for $25 a year was in the long-term sustainable. Yahoo probably realized this as storage kept going up and up and up and up. An advertising model is much more sustainable. All of us who are loyal Pro accounts get to keep our same great deal, but the cost of that may well go up over time.
How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?
10-20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer and Flickr new update is designed to that end. The more time you spend in the add based website, the more money they make on the backs of your images. The upside is that, the audience for our images on Flickr is going to go up.
There has been a trend for casual users moving to Facebook where they are displaying their photos. The 200 limit for casual users on Flickr has added to this move. It's hard to see how Flickr can get these users back now that they have made other contacts there. Flickr then became mostly a site for serious photographers but now the current tendency appears to be to try and attract those casual users back.
Copyright and orphan files
The UK copyright law in under going a revision that's been going on for the last few years. The bits of the law relating to so-called "orphan works" were only agreed by parliament a few weeks ago and pave the way for some detailed regulations about how the new provisions will work.
It's still very early days, but Flickr are talking to the government about how the system will work in practice – for example, the question of what kind of a search needs to be conducted before a photo can really be called "orphan". The aim is to make sure that your photos are as safe as they always have been on Flickr.
Well know commercial professional photography based websites have had their pictures intentionally stolen for re-posting with varying degrees of expertise applied to obscuring the source(s) by cropping out large, colorful watermarks and logos, complete erasure of EXIF or even masking techniques to "get rid of" watermarks without cropping, in some instances.
What worry's me is that Flickr are happy for us to up load our full size images, but to what end, and why don't they want you to see your stats anymore. My (Unknown Source) keeps going up, but who are they. Can Yahoo! be trusted with all these images.
The Telegraph"Yahoo said a file of ID details for 22million people was stolen during an attack by hackers, but claimed the file did not contain sufficient details for full-blown identity theft."
The Inquirer"UK INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER(ISP) BT has announced plans to ditch Yahoo Mail and switch its customers to its own mail service, following complaints about hacked accounts and spam."
The report comes from Channel 4 News"Still reeling from a major security breach last month, a fresh report claims that hundreds of Yahoo email accounts have been hacked for the fourth time in as many months, raising serious doubts about the email provider’s ability to protect its customer’s accounts from cyber criminals and malicious spam."
This link makes an interesting read from
Micheal Stutz
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