Flickr proprietor SmugMug emails subscribers with an pressing request: assist us discover extra paying customers

Posted On Jan 19, 2020 By admin With Comments Off

When in April of last year, the photo hosting service SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said he was committed to breathing brand-new life into the service, calling it” core to the entire fabric of the Internet .”

MacAskill didn’t reveal at the time how much SmugMug — which is itself an independent, family-owned operation — paid for Flickr. But it seems now that SmugMug may have underestimated its conduct payments. In an email tonight to users of Flickr who pays roughly $50 yearly for the service, MacAskill has basically asked them if they know anyone else who might be interested in a yearly subscription to Flickr, explaining that it” still needs your help. It’s still losing money .”

Adds MacAskill, in periods that Flickr fans will surely interpret as terribly perturbing, SmugMug” cannot cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve is being done .”( To candy the administer for new customers, SmugMug is offering 25% off a Flickr Pro account for those who visit this link and input the system 25 in2019 .)

This editor happens to be a Flickr Pro user and throbs to contemplate how many photos I’d have to move if the service shuts down. At the same time , no one who uses the service can be atrociously surprised by the development. Just months after SmugMug acquired Flickr, it curbed free exploit of the pulpit to 1,000 draws per history incumbent. In detail, it threatened to actively delete the photos of users who did not sign up for a due if they outperformed that number.

Beyond its operating costs, SmugMug, like so many other fellowships, too spotted itself engulfed in dispute recently when the New York Times reported that millions of Flickr portraits dating back to its 2005 founding had been sucked into a facial-recognition database announced MegaFace to” drill a new generation of face-identification algorithms ,”” trail protesters, surveil terrorists, place question adventurers and spy on the public at large .”

Ben MacAskill, Don’s brother and the company’s COO, said at the time that the inaccuracy” potentially impacts a very small number of our members today, and we are actively working to deploy an update as speedily as possible .” He too noticed … … that the likeness that had been accessed pre-dated SmugMug’s involvement with Flickr by several years.

Either way, it sounds like the future of Flickr — founded by financiers Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield in 2004, sold to Yahoo the subsequent year, and later cleaned into Verizon as part of its 2016 buy by Yahoo — is again up in the air. Either more beings subscribe to the service, or someone — or some outfit — lunges in to save the day with the capital required to keep it up and running.

In the worst case scenario, it disappears, together with a whole lot of pictures.

Here’s the full text of Don MacAskill’s note to its purchasers 😛 TAGEND

Dear Flickr Pros,

First, and above all else: thank you. Thank you for being a part of our community. Thank you for caring about Flickr. Thank you for supporting Flickr. Thank you for being a Flickr Pro.

Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year. Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being closed down and to save tens of billions of your treasured photos from being erased.

Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly improving our fellowship into a thriving, family-owned and -operated business that upkeeps passionately about photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by and watch Flickr vanish.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place where photographers can stand out and fit in.

And hitherto, Flickr–the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business–still needs your help.

We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. We hired an excellent, massive staff of Support Heroes who now deliver support with an average customer satisfaction rating of above 90%. We got rid of Yahoo’s login. We leaved the programme and every photo to Amazon Web Assistance( AWS ), the industry leader in gloom compute, and modernized its engineering along the way. As a decision, sheets are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more rapidly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are space down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new aspects are being built once again.

Our work is never done, but we’ve realized tremendous progress.

Flickr still needs your help. It’s still losing money. You, and hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and met Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful. It’s losing a lot less money than it was. But it’s not yet representing enough.

We need more Flickr Pro representatives if we want to keep the Flickr dream alive, and we need your help to share the story of Flickr.

We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike pulpits like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to infest your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we affection photography, and we accept Flickr deserves not only to live on but thrive. We suppose the nations of the world concurs; and we thoughts the Flickr community does, very. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as we’ve been doing.

Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the world’s best road to find immense photography and connect with amazing photographers. Flickr multitudes some of the world’s most iconic, most priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of photos. It dishes millions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to operate. Slew of money.

As you know, Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the world. Flickr Pro representatives get ad-free browsing for themselves and their pilgrims, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all their photos, plus fee features and access to the world’s largest photographer-focused community.

Please, help us spread the word. Help us draw Flickr thrive. Help us ensure Flickr has a luminou future. Every Flickr Pro subscription proceeds immediately to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new events for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday, December 26, but I want to give you a ticket code to share with friends, genealogy, or anyone who shares your beloved of photography and society so they can enjoy the same 25% discount before the campaign starts.

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small price increase early in the brand-new year, so this is truly the very best time to help everyone upgrade to a Pro membership.

If you appreciate Flickr eventually being independent, to construct photographers and by photographers, we need your help. With grateful,

Don MacAskill

Co-Founder, CEO& Chief Geek SmugMug+ Flickr