Cool has no ‘e’ in it!
Tumblr + Flickr and MarissaMayr. Yeah ‘cool’ has no ‘e’ in it.
Yahoo! made an acquisition announcement and a product announcement in two consecutive days. (or may be within hours)
Yahoo! acquired Tumblr and revamped Flickr
The dying Flickr
Many of the photographers around the world never liked the way Yahoo! killed Flickr. From the beginning itself Flickr stood out for it’s own distinct features. It was one of the most modern website on Internet before the modern web and browser advancements we’ve seen in the recent years. Over the period of time it slowly faded out. Many of the photographers stopped the paid Flickr subscription and flocked to social networks like Facebook, Google+, 500px etc.
Facebook influenced photographers with wider audience and better marketing platform. Facebook also improved their photo sharing and viewing experience from a terrible state.
Google+ stands out with it’s great design promotes content creation at the best. The freedom to publish full resolution photos, shared drive space (unlimited for regular size photos) etc. You can see lot of popular photographers are there are Google+ than anywhere else.
Where Flickr stands in this social war?
The bold and beautiful
Marissa Mayer took really bold steps ever since she joined Yahoo! The new features make Flickr really cool again. 1 terabyte of space is available for free for all users, full resolutions photos, mobile support, seamless layout for your stream and lot more! It’s a good reason to come back to the people who left the home.
A social network for art and creation
Acquisition of Tumblr is a excellent move by Yahoo! The combination of Flickr and Tumblr is even brilliant as both of the services are stand for the reason of art and content creation. Tumblr can brings genuine audience to the publishers and Yahoo! now owns a social network which they were missing for years.
Mayer’s echoing Yahoo! feeling for more being content centric and cool to attract more creators as she noted in her post on Tumblr
The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.
David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.
Now Flickr users will get more relevant audience with Tumblr and and it’s has got a better name without losing it’s coolness.
Why Tumblr?
Marco Arment wrote after Tumblr’s acquisition
MySpace was where you went in the past, WordPress and Movable Type were where people went if they had the patience and writing output to maintain a traditional blog, Facebook was where you went to define yourself by schools and checkboxes, and Tumblr was where you went to make your own identity and express your creativity.
The statistics which Marissa Mayer shared gives a better view on the popularity of Tumblr.
Tumblr has built an amazing place to follow the world’s creators. From art to architecture, fashion to food, Tumblr hosts 105 million different blogs. With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent onsite each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app, and those users do an average of 7 sessions per day. Tumblr’s tremendous popularity and engagement among creators, curators and audiences of all ages brings a significant new community of users to the Yahoo! network. The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%.
As Tumblr stands out as a creative platform, yes this is a kind of social network Yahoo! badly wanted to make it more content centric and not try to make another Facebook as Google attempted and failed.
Where’s the money with Flickr?
The yearly subscriptions are gone now. There are two options which are not really going to make sense for a normal user. A $49.99 to go ad-free; $499.99 to double your (1 TB) storage. May be nice to have features if you’re super rich or feeling so loyal to Yahoo!.
Making money out of Tumblr and Flickr is Yahoo!’s problem. It’s all about attracting users (back) to their platform. It’s also good if they can think about helping photographers to make some money (with a cut) for their work.
How Yahoo! to deal with NSFW?
Tumblr contains age restricted material which could possibly conflict with Yahoo! content policies. Yahoo! has no plan to control restricted materials on Tumblr as they find it as nature of user generated content. But it’s not a big problem as Tumblr is not at all a porn destination on Internet. You can choose what you wish to see.
Cool has no ‘e’ in it
If Facebook acquired Instagram out of fear of their growth, Yahoo! has got a perfect reason for Tumblr and I am sure they will do well! All the best Marissa Mayr, Yahoo!, Flickr and Tumblr (Yeah ‘cool’ has no ‘e’ in it).
