Flickr Needs Your Help!

It seems like Flickr is still having problems even after its acquisition by Smug Mug.

And they need your help to survive according to an open letter from the website to fans and supporters.

Don MacAskill, founder and current CEO of Smug Mug, appealed directly to the photography community to “keep the Flickr dream alive” and outlined the various changes and their benefits that Smug Mug has made to the platform.

Comparing the monthly pro price to a streaming subscription to Netflix, MacAskill posits that, as the world’s “largest photographer-focused community” on the Internet, Flickr is not relevant but somewhat essential to the medium.

“We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We think the world agrees; and we think the Flickr community does, too. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing,” he writes in the letter.

Some of the changes that Smug Mug brought to the table almost immediately included getting rid of all attachments to Yahoo’s login infrastructure as well as making the site itself more robust.

They also hired a customer service team which has posted impressive customer service satisfaction scores.

The letter is accompanied by a year-end discount on a full-year subscription for 2020.

MacAskill also hinted that subscriber fees might go up next year as an added incentive to “act now.”

Whether the letter is some interesting marketing or a true indication of Flickr’s current state of affairs seems to be up in the air at this point though many people who think it is totally authenticate also point out that it wouldn’t be wise to entice people to a service by hinting that it might not be around much longer.

What do you think?

Clever marketing or is Flickr facing a rocky future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Also, check out some of our other photography news articles on Light Stalking by clicking here.

[PetaPixel]