3 reasons why Wikipedia — not Adobe — is the ideal match for Flickr
1) The first reason is due to Adobe’s recent creation, neglect and abandonment of its “Workspace” (Buzzword, Tables, Presentations) platform. As the company officially stated in 2014:
Adobe’s focus is to continue to provide world-class [insert proprietary file format here] creation and conversion products and services that enable our customers to take actions on their files anywhere on any device”
Maintaining #Flickr over the long term would be a thousand times more resource intensive than a few cloud-based office apps.
2) Second, Flickr is a platform built for a different era. It’s technologically outdated. It’s the social media T-101 — the 800 series model of image sharing.
Flickr is a 2.0-era service that still boasts lots of active users. But most of them don’t pay anything (ask #Yahoo). And Flickr’s limited social functionality and lack of real monetization tools/ad engagement tech (like decent search results for photos, or AI-supported facial recognition for tagging friends) means that it’s mostly a parking garage for content.
Even with Yahoo behind it, Flickr still doesn’t even have a decent content discovery algorithm, which is part of the reason why the more “social” 500px has become such a popular alternative. Bottom line, it would be really tough for Adobe to squeeze any advertising revenue or make any stock photo licensing money from Flickr.
3) Third, Flickr’s user base doesn’t quite align with Adobe’s service-based, cloud-focused business model. While Flickr has always maintained a supportive (some might say cult-like) pro-amateur community, the most valuable users that Adobe picks up with an acquisition of Flickr probably already use its paid apps and services.
So, Adobe doesn’t gain much (from a subscription perspective) by purchasing Flickr other than goodwill. And, of course, some of Flickr’s users inherently would be turned off if the service was acquired by the largest creative software company in the world.
Growth-wise, Flickr is probably as large as it will get. Sure, more content and features can be added. And the number of paid subscriptions might increase. But even Adobe couldn’t dump nearly enough resources into overhauling Flickr’s platform to begin to compete with the likes of Facebook/Instagram — or Apple — for regular users. Even popular Flickr photographers must re-share their Flickr content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Not to mention still photos and linear video content are an endangered species.
The best candidate for purchasing Flickr, IMO, is an organization like Wikipedia. They already have Wikimedia for hosting digital assets, but it would be a smart move by Wikipedia to pick up Flickr’s active user base and add the virtual treasure chest of metadata and geotagged content to its sites. Wikipedia could open up and connect Flickr’s content to millions of existing and future encyclopedia entries.
More importantly, as a nonprofit, Wikipedia could lobby Flickr’s users to open up (i.e., Creative Commons license) their content for reasons that doesn’t have anything to do with increasing corporate profit or shareholder value.
Compared to Adobe, Wikipedia+Flickr (=Flickrpedia) seems like a win-win: Wikipedia adds one of the largest content troves around — much of it already tagged with metadata — and might actually be able to do something meaningful with it.
Wikipedia could leverage Flickr’s user base (and the mobile app) to contribute to a shared global interest community — wiki articles, news pics, travel, education, architecture and history — on a more meaningful level than almost any other online platform.
Does Wikipedia have the cash to save Flickr if it’s spun out of Yahoo in a fire sale? Who knows. It could even be the start of the visual overhaul that Wikipedia desperately needs. It could be… Flickrpedia.
Thats my 25 cents. Happy to consult! 😉
