Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

The internet has spoken and earlier today Flickr officially responded. Their response pretty much sums up the biggest challenge for Flickr/Yahoo going forward, getting people to work there. Flickr desperately needs four things right now: money/resources, engineering talent, design talent, and community management/marketing talent. Money/resources is the easy part, hiring the talent may prove more difficult.

The trend is not Flickr’s friend. According to compete.com over the past year Flickr’s unique U.S. visitors have dropped about 22%. The sad slow decline of Flickr in many ways mirrors the sad slow decline of lots of other properties at Yahoo.

So why should Marissa Mayer make Flickr awesome again and how should she do it?

The number one reason why Marissa should be focusing on Flickr right now is that it is highest visibility, most beloved Yahoo property of all. You didn’t see mass users taking to the internet to tell her to fix Yahoo Finance, or Yahoo Sports, or Yahoo Real Estate. No. They came cheering for Flickr. Flickr has deeper emotional and social connections to users than any other Yahoo property. Reinvigorating Flickr should be Marissa’s highest priority because it represents the best possible way for her to send the most visible message that Yahoo is in fact changing, that Yahoo is back in the hunt, that Yahoo cares about their users. It’s going to take work and money but it can be done.

Here is how.

1. It has to start at the top. It’s embarrassing that according to a public search Mayer still doesn’t have a Flickr account. Not only does she not have a Flickr account, she’s using one of Flickr’s most public competitors to share her photos personally. This fact was not lost on me and it wasn’t lost on the financial or tech press. From Bloomberg: “…and, like any proud parent these days, the photo-sharing site she linked to wasn’t Flickr—she used Instagram.” From Wired: “But that’s going to take commitment and outreach from Mayer who, right now, doesn’t even have an account there.” Dog fooding is important. If Flickr Mobile is broken, then Mayer needs to suffer through it with the rest of us and hopefully get it fixed.

2. Flickr needs a big hire in an evangelist role. They need to hire a very visible name that will make the press. Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Trey Ratcliff, Chase Jarvis, or someone of this caliber. They need to make a big splash and they need not only a very visible hire, they need someone who is maniacally (in the good way) connected to social media. They need someone who will eat, breath and sleep Flickr and who will be out promoting the brand everywhere on the web and in person. This person should also host at least one major photo walk in one major city a month. Flickr and Yahoo should leverage their resources to make these walks big splashy public events that make people sit up and notice that Flickr has their mojo back. This person will not be cheap. Yahoo will have to pay up and Mayer herself will probably need to help recruit them.

3. Along with a new Flickr evangelist, Mayer should work with them and Flickr head of product Markus Spiering to heavily and personally recruit some of the top engineers and designers to come to work on Flickr. Flickr should not just be hiring regular old engineers and designers. They should be hiring engineers and designers who are the rock stars. Again, they will have to really pay up for these people — right now the rock star talent wants to work at Facebook and Google, not Yahoo.

If they can get 4 or 5 of these rock star types though they can then use these individuals to recruit even more talent to the Flickr team. Flickr needs to be careful here and not just hire any old engineer who wants a 9 to 5 job. They need to recruit engineers who, like Marissa apparently, want to work it 24/7 and are amazing. They should be rewarded very well and Mayer should use her personal connections to get the right people in these seats.

4. Flickr should begin a structured engagement program with their top users. They should use their internal data at Flickr to see which users are engaging the most and are the most engaged with on Flickr. They should personally contact each of these individuals and make them part of the process for improving Flickr. They should set up a private invite only group where they invite the elite of Flickr, those most heavily invested in Flickr engagement, and personally make them a part of the process going forward.

5. Flickr should set up an ambassador program. They should pay ambassadors $1,000/month (these would not be Flickr employees) to represent Flickr in their respective cities. Part of that responsibility would be to host a photowalk at least once a month (if not more). They would also breath new life into the geographic group best represented on Flickr for their area. Flickr might consider inviting them to San Francisco for an offsite once a year.

6. Engineers/Designers should start working on these problems right away: porting Flickr’s new justified pages to the rest of the site, developing circles for your Flickr contact management, giving people better blocking tools on the site, giving people better filtering tools on the site, creating a cross group subscription system that would aggregate all of the threads you are following in all of your groups and managing these threads as a single forum for you personally, building a first class mobile experience on par with Instagram, and a lot of other things. They should position flickr as a fast moving, innovative, perpetual beta team and Yahoo execs and PR should be cheerleaders with every innovation going forward. Want to see how this is done, just watch Vic Gundotra’s Google+ stream.

7. Yahoo should begin re-evaluating their relationship with Getty Images. Their goal should be to get more photographers paid more money and have more of their photos represented in the Getty Collection. If Yahoo cannot improve this situation in a meaningful way they should consider terminating the Getty relationship, acquiring a smaller stock photography competitor and building this in house. Stock photography should not be considered for what it can add to the bottom line, but for what it can do to recruit the best photographers in the world to post their work on Flickr.

8. Yahoo should heavily promote Flickr with it’s other brands. All other Yahoo properties should begin thinking of how they might incorporate Flickr photos into their properties. Image Search seems like a no brainer. It should be a Yahoo goal to double the amount of Flickr photos in their image search results in the next 60 days. Every site that uses photography on Yahoo should be charged with figuring out a way how to increase Flickr Images in their products. Yahoo may need to develop a sort of opt-in structure for this type of promotion (or better yet an opt out) to deal with photographer’s rights issues and grumpy photographers who might not want their work better promoted and represented on Yahoo, but many will enjoy the extra attention and views and it’s a natural place for Yahoo to go to for imagery.

Mayer needs to hold her new team accountable for the performance of unique users at Flickr. Flickr has been losing unique users and if Flickr is going to seriously compete in the new great big photo sharing world of the WWW, they need to let the photographers of the world know that they are back in a big way and are here to win. Success at Flickr should then be highly promoted by Yahoo PR to show that Yahoo does indeed have their mojo back and that Mayer is in fact winning. More than anything this is the reputation that Yahoo needs to change — excelling at Flickr is one of the best ways that Yahoo can illustrate that to the world. If Yahoo can’t do this then they should just call it a day and sell Flickr to Google now. They will just continue to bleed users and it will be a sore reminder that Yahoo is still languishing every time some new meme about making Flickr awesome again catches the internet’s attention.

Dear Marissa,

Congratulations on your new position with Yahoo. I’ve been a huge fan of Google for a long time and have admired the work that you’ve done there. Google Maps, specifically, has been a big part of my life. Google Maps is the primary reason I switched from an iPhone to an Android phone in fact. The ability to add my maps as a layer on a mobile device when I go to photograph a new city is, for me, an incredibly important feature.

You’ve done so much more than look after things like maps at Google though and more than anything you understand the culture that has made Google a success and how the web works more broadly speaking.

I’ve written open letters to the last two Yahoo CEOs, Scott Thompson and Carol Bartz. The third time’s a charm, as they say back in business school, so I thought I’d take an opportunity to welcome you to your new position as well. Hopefully, Yahoo got a winner this time — I think that maybe they did.

First of all, my bias — I’m a photographer. I’m also a photographer who has deeply integrated the web into my photography and into my life. I joined Flickr the year they started in 2004, back before the Yahoo acquisition. I’m what they call “old skool” there. Since then I’ve used the site almost every day of my life. I’ve got over 73,000 photos published there now. Over the last 8 years I’ve favorited over 100,000 photos by other photographers. I’ve spent thousands of hours living in groups, forums, sets, and photostreams. I know the site really well.

Although Flickr has been successful in my opinion, it’s only lived up to about 5% of its potential. Flickr had huge, enormous potential when Yahoo bought the site back in 2005. Flickr *could* have been Facebook. I sincerely believe this. Instead it was clumsily duct taped on to the side of Yahoo. It’s founders worked out their contractual obligations of the sale and then bolted. Stewart Butterfield exited with one of the most creative resignation letters ever written in the history of tech — and after that Flickr was left to wither and almost die.

Flickr never died of course, it’s just that through a combination of Flickr management and Yahoo management it was put into deep sleep mode. The fact that for part of this time Flickr was unprofitable probably didn’t really help their chances. Even when Flickr did start to make money, they didn’t make much. Getting bean counters to invest in some grand future of the web was not something that Yahoo did well back then. The good news was that during this period of time Flickr didn’t really have any serious competition. This was also bad news too though because it created a hostile environment with users where we were abused because, well, where else could you go?

Photos are big part of the future of the web. A huge, giant, massive part of the future of the web. You might say photos were the genesis of Facebook. Why did people come to Facebook originally? To see photos.

Over the past few years web companies are finally beginning to understand the importance of photos. Instagram was a huge hit. They did mobile photos right. What Instagram understood was that people wanted to do two things on their mobile device — see photos by their friends and let their friends know that they were watching by sending a positive vibe. So they made the simpliest interface possible to do just that — you just swipe/scroll, tap/tap, scroll, tap/tap, scroll, tap/tap. This can go on for hours. They also capitalized on this new aesthetic that people have for a vintage film feel with their simple filters and the superiority of the square photo format for presentation.

Google also recognized the potential of photography and, as you know, photos are very deeply integrated into the Google+ experience. What a bunch of winners the team at Google Photos is. Google gave us huge full screen versions of photos first. They gave us great looking photostreams with big oversized thumbnails first. They promoted photographers in big ways. The executives personally reshared our work. They created a special category for photographers on their “Get Started” list. Is it a surprise that so many photographers are so well represented in the 1 million+ follower category on G+? Google understood that integrating beautiful and interesting photos, along with photos by your family and friends, was a way to make G+ more compelling and visually stimulating. Photos completely dominate the new G+ mobile app and tablet app as well.

More than this Google embraced the online photography community in ways that it hadn’t been embraced since the earliest days of Flickr. Google seized the opportunity to showcase that this community could become more than just a web thing. Google sponsored photo walks. Googlers participated in our photo trips. Google gave us broadcasted hangouts. Lotus Carroll and I just broadcasted our 30th weekly episode of Photo Talk Plus last week where photographers can hang out on live video and in a chat room that goes with the show and interact.

The success of Google+ with the photography community was not lost on Facebook. Facebook quickly mimicked Google’s presentation and layout for photos. The old photo thumbnails at Facebook were super tiny. Postage stamped size. Facebook went from just a couple of employees looking after photos to a whole team working on photos. Photos got bigger and better looking. New full screen versions were developed. Photos are featured much more prominently in the timeline feature. Facebook has given notice that they are here to compete with Google+ in photos in a big way. Google has the lead for sure, but Facebook is a serious competitor coming on strong.

So what about Flickr? Flickr represents the largest collection of quality organized photos on the web today. Facebook has more photos, but Flickr has better photos and better organized photos with quality metadata organized around the photos.

Flickr is also probably the most loved and passionately cared about service that Yahoo currently offers. It’s one of those properties whose significance should not be weighed by a profit and loss statement. It should be understood that embracing the passion of these users and harnessing that for Yahoo is the biggest social opportunity for Yahoo at present.

Yahoo has, with Flickr, the core to launch a serious contender to both Google+ and Facebook. Flickr is not “just photos.” Within the DNA of Flickr is a highly social property with serious potential if given the right resources and attention. Flickr Groups could become a powerhouse for groups all across the web that have nothing to do with photography. Competition is fierce though and time is short. Google Events is the first step towards creating a more meaningful group experience at Google and they did Google Events really, really well. It almost feels like it was built for, yes, wait for it — photographers.

So here is where I’ll give my armchair quarterback advice on what to do with Flickr.

Option 1 — sell it to Google. Google needs it. Google is playing catch up in a big way with Facebook in the social networking space. Google sort of has to keep Picasa as it is because it’s used by a lot of people, but Picasa in its current form will never likely become a social powerhouse. Google needs something more powerful than Picasa to funnel into Google+.

Google has the commitment to social, the money, the design and engineering talent, etc. to really do something big with it. What Instagram is to Facebook as a stand alone property, Flickr could become to Google+. Google would acquire the rich archive that Flickr represents and be able to better index this library of images for image search. They could monetize this archive better than the current Flickr/Getty deal which pays photographers out a ridiculously low rate of 20% on the sale of stock photography.

Google would get many important, visible and significant Flickr streams like the Royal Family and the President Obama that they could more deeply integrate into Google+. They’d get less famous streams but equally culturally important streams by museums and governmental archives.

Yahoo and Google have been competitors in the past. You have relationships with people at Google. If your jumping ship to Yahoo isn’t seen as an act of betrayal by your Google friends, you could definitely broker this sort of a sale.

Facebook’s a potential buyer too, but Google needs it more and the users would go with Google over Facebook I think in a migration. I might be wrong but I see Facebook post-Instagram as being more interested in growing out their photo stuff organically than in buying something like Flickr.

2. Option 2 — Seriously invest in Flickr and grow it. Flickr needs a ton of work, but could have huge potential still. Why let Getty keep the bulk of stock photography sales? Renegotiate that relationship and cut out the middle man. Acquire a stock photography agency. Open up stock sales to more users and more of their photos. Stock sales at Flickr have nothing to do with the revenue that you could generate from that business and everything to do with your ability to attract the best photographers on the web today to publish their stuff through Flickr which would be a greater benefit. The money is just an easy way to get more of these types on board.

Why am I only selling 200 of my photos as stock on Getty and getting 20% payout when I could be selling all 73,000 of my photos as stock on Flickr/Yahoo and we split it 50/50? Figure out the liability issues, these can be insured against to a large degree and use this money as a magnet to funnel the best photographers in the world into Flickr.

Your current manager for Flickr Markus Spiering is a good one but he needs a lot more resources. Flickr needs to move their new justified layout to other areas of the site. They need a basic mobile app to flip through and easily fave photos. They need a thread reader for groups on the mobile. Flickr needs circles/lists/buckets to better manage our contacts. Flickr needs more robust blocking tools — when you block someone on Flickr they should be totally invisible to you everywhere on the site.

Flickr does have what some might call an amateur porn problem or an amateur porn opportunity depending on how you look at it. What this is and how it exists at Flickr should be understood from a political/revenue standpoint and figured out — or maybe not.

Flickr needs to invest more heavily in community management. Markus has started to revitalize some of this along with Zack Sheppard, who is Flickr’s community manager, but much more work is needed here. Flickr should be courting the photography community in really robust ways and leveraging community leaders as new unofficial company evangelists (like Google Photos has done so well).

Yahoo should more broadly promote their key Flickr photographers across other Yahoo properties. Image search at Yahoo should recognize Flickr’s powerful interestingness algorithm and include far more results from Flickr in both image and web search. Yahoo should figure out how to identify key Flickr community leaders and look to promote their work across other Yahoo properties.

Option 3 — keep Flickr as it is now. This is the least attractive option in my opinion. Flickr’s value will erode over time. You’ll get less for it if you sell it later as they’ll continue to lose their lead in photo social networking in the photography space. Facebook, Instagram, Google+ are all competing heavily for this business and will only continue into the future. They are allocating millions of dollars towards their social networking efforts where photos play a big role.

Without investing in Flickr to try and reclaim the title of “king of the photo networks” and in fact leveraging this into something far beyond photos in social networking, Yahoo is much better off selling it today than waiting three years down the road.

If you ever want to talk photos at Flickr/Yahoo feel free to drop me a line. I love photography on the web and can talk about ways to make Flickr better all day long if you’re interested in it.

Oh, and sign up for a Flickr account and encourage people you know to share photos on it too. It doesn’t look like you have one yet. These things may not seem like they matter, but they do. Leading by example sends a powerful message both to the troops and to the photo community more broadly speaking. By using Flickr you also hopefully can better understand the potential of what it can become in the future.

New Flickr Group Photo Pool

Old Flickr Group Photo Pool

Today Flickr continues their impressive overhaul by converting the ugly old thumbnail photo view of their group photo pools, to their beautiful new justified photo mosaic view that they rolled out earlier this year for their “photos from your contacts” page and your “favorites” page. This is a much better way to view photos and much easier to hover/fave photos when reviewing them. This should bump up the faves that people get by putting their photos in group pools and give heavy group users more traction on their photos.

Although group photo pools are important and this improvement in Flickr groups today is nice, the real action for groups is in the threads.

The most active social photographers on Flickr live in groups. I’ve always felt that Flickr’s groups represent Yahoo’s best chance at social. If years ago Yahoo had pushed Flickr’s group format harder and across more of their services, I think that they could have had a social winner. Flickr’s groups are still the best group structure anywhere on the web. This is the one area where Yahoo leads in photo sharing. Google has no groups and Facebook’s groups are not as engaging as Flickr’s.

For many years I was one of those people who lived in Flickr groups. I administered a few very popular groups and was super active on a daily basis. I’ve quit the old groups that I was active in on Flickr and don’t use Flickr groups anymore though. The biggest problem with Flickr groups today is that Flickr lacks an effective way to block people. Some of Flickr’s groups (including those that I was active in) would attract the absolute worst sort of people in the world — trolls, griefers, harassers. I watched human beings do some of the most ugly things that I’ve ever seen human beings do inside of Flickr’s groups.

While Flickr has *some* mechanisms to deal with the psychotic, anti-social, and evil people in this world, what groups ultimately lack (and why I don’t use Flickr groups anymore) is a robust blocking tool (like Google+ has). On Google+ when you block somebody, they are really blocked. Not only can they not comment on your threads, anywhere that they exist on Google+ they are filtered out of your experience, they become 100% invisible to you. When the truly horrible people of the world began harassing you on G+ you simply block them and never have to deal with them again. They can still enjoy Google+ and still interact with everyone who is not blocking them, but it makes it much harder for them to harass *you* when you can’t see anything that they are doing.

By contrast, when you block someone on Flickr, although they can’t comment on your photos anymore, they can still comment in the groups that you are in and you have to see their vile hatred. They can also stalk you and follow you around Flickr putting comments on photos after you comment so that you see their comments in your recent activity stream, etc. There is no way on Flickr to filter out this sort of harassment at present.

Google’s superior blocking functionality does something more than just clean up your social experience though. Because the consequence for anti-social behavior is so dire (with Google’s complete and total block) it actually encourages people to be on better behavior. People are friendlier and more polite because those that just want to hurt other people or cause grief are quickly marginalized into obscurity as more and more people block them. Bad behavior removes your soapbox on Google+. Although Flickr does allow a group administrator the power to ban trolls, it doesn’t give group members the same freedom to filter them out of their personal experience. It’s either you choose the group or you don’t. You take it as it is and have no control over what you see in your group and what you don’t.

If a user decides he/she is going to bomb the group threads with SCAT porn (as has been done in Flickr groups in the past) there is no mechanism for you to take control over that account and filter it out. Instead you have to wait for an admin to come around and deal with it, or report it to Flickr to eventually deal with it. This makes groups a hostile place on Flickr and I’ve watched many of the best Flickr accounts completely abandon groups. The sad thing is that Flickr could clear this up so quickly just by adopting Google+’s superior approach of allowing us a total and complete blocking tool. For the life of me I have no idea why Flickr would want to force people who don’t want to interact with each other to interact. You should be able to block anyone for any reason.

The other thing that Flickr groups need is the ability to hide certain threads and filter them out of your flickr experience. Thread bumping can contribute to conversation in groups, but inevitably there are threads that you are just not interested in. I may love a group and love participating in it, but if I hate football, why should I have to keep seeing the “who is going to win the superbowl” thread? Why not let me filter whatever threads I want out of my group experience?

Also if I *really* like a certain thread, I should be able to subscribe to it. Flickr should then give me a single page where I can view all of the threads that I’m subscribed to across all groups sorted by recent activity. This would create much more cross pollination of groups and also help me ensure that I don’t miss the threads that I care the most about.

Finally, flickr needs to create a simple group thread reader on the mobile. These are Flickr’s most active users. Flickr should want them engaging in group threads while they are in line at the supermarket instead of browsing around on Instagram or Facebook. Today’s mobile app lacks any ability to browse group threads on Flickr and trying to view an actual thread page on flickr with a mobile browser is nearly impossible. Getting group threads into mobile should be a top priority for Flickr as the thread addicts are the most hardcore users on Flickr of all.

Flickr Product Chief Markus Spiering Shoots an Old Skool Polaroid Camera at Last Month’s Mission District Photowalk

Quote from Mat Honan’s Gizmodo article on Flickr: “Flickr wasn’t a startup anymore,” explains the engineer, “people didn’t really want to work that hard to turn the entire product around. Even if they had, Flickr [was] very techie hipster, many didn’t use or like Facebook and considered it bland, boring, evil, poorly designed, etc., and were certainly not ready to fast follow it. Emphasis was put more on how things looked, and felt, rather than on metrics and on what worked. The whole experience was very frustrating for me all around, as I slowly watched Flickr and Yahoo fade into irrelevance.”

[Warning, this is going to be a very long post by me. I've got a lot to say about Flickr.]

Mat Honan has a pretty detailed and in-depth story on the history of Flickr and how Yahoo strangled the once exciting and promising photo sharing site over at Gizmodo. Mat talks to a lot of insiders and former insiders and the picture he paints overall is pretty bleak. I have no idea how accurate the story is. Many of the people cited in the article are cited unnamed and anonymously, but a lot of it feels about right to me.

I joined Flickr during their first year in 2004 — pre-Yahoo. I’m what you’d call “old skool” on Flickr and have been pretty active there just about every single day since signing up except for a brief hiatus. I’ve uploaded over 71,000 photos, participated actively in groups for years, and have handed out thousands of comments and over 100,000 favorites.

After the Yahoo acquisition I became more and more and more negative on Flickr over time. This manifested itself in countless blog posts I wrote criticizing the company and its management.

For me, most of my frustration was around three key issues.

1. It felt like Flickr simply refused to innovate.

2. It felt like the people who managed Flickr and worked for Flickr simply didn’t care about the users or the product.

3. My data didn’t feel safe and I worried about the community management team irrevocably and permanently deleting accounts without warning to users.

In my frustration, primarily over these three issues, I wrote open letters to Yahoo executives. I wrote an article that got alot of attention titled Flickr is Dead. When promising competitors came on the scene like 500px or Google+ I lauded their efforts. Forcing competition on Flickr felt like a good thing to me.

Because of my criticism I felt like Flickr had retaliated against me. I was banned from the Flickr Help Forum after criticizing the company and their practices. I was blacklisted from the popular Explore section of the site (even as Flickr’s former community manager Heather Champ denied that an Explore blacklist existed).

I think I was so passionately vocal about my feelings on Flickr because I’d become so emotionally invested in it over the years. I found real community there for so long — in the groups, in the photowalks, in the photo trips and meetups, in the day to day back and forth between me and people that I met and became friends with through the site. I wanted so much more for Flickr than what it felt like it had stagnated into.

I wanted the people who ran Yahoo and who worked on Flickr to care and to give a damn. I wanted to see passion and people who wanted to change the world.

By being so vocal and negative about Flickr I made a lot of enemies. In hindsight I’m not sure my approach was the best one. Over the years Flickr has had their band of sycophantic defenders who have simply refused to accept anyone saying anything critical about the site. These people by and large hate my guts today.

Some of Flickr’s most ardent supporters over the years created a cabal on the site. They’d dominate the Flickr Help forum and talk down to users who expressed any sort of dissatisfaction over the service. They would attack me there when I was banned and unable to defend myself.

When users would complain about having their account deleted without warning, they would almost always blame and attack the user rather than admit that a system with no “undo” button on deletions was dangerous and stupid. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, even Flickr censors. This problem went ignored for years until Yahoo accidentally deleted Mirco Wilhelm’s account last year and ended up getting trashed in the mainstream media on sites like CNN over it.

It’s almost cathartic a little to read Mat’s detailed post on Flickr because so much of it resonates with me as a heavy user over the years — the forcing of everyone into Yahoo accounts for example (which we were told would have no impact on us whatsoever but which was soon used to censor photos to German and other members). Mat’s description of focus by Yahoo executives on money and short-term profits and business while they ignored the huge social significance of what Flickr could have become feels spot on. In my mind Flickr could have become Facebook if only Yahoo had tried. They could have been just as big. Flickr could have been the company completely dominating Yahoo instead of the other way around. It could have been so much more than just photosharing.

I do think there are some things that Mat gets wrong in his article though. Mat paints Flickr today as an abandoned ghost town. Mat writes, “The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.”

He adds, “As I scroll down I note that friend after friend has quit posting. At the bottom of the page I am already back in mid 2010. So many of my friends have vanished. It feels like MySpace, circa 2009.”

I’m more active on Flickr today than Mat is. I still use the site daily and this doesn’t really describe my experience there. If I boot up my contacts photos there is still page after page after page of new and vibrant photos freshly added, not just this year or this month or this week, but this very day.

A lot of what your Flickr experience will be today depends on who you follow. I still have new users adding my photostream every single day. New blood is the lifeblood of every community and Flickr does indeed still get alot of new blood even as many old users have left. You have to keep up with these new people too and that takes energy. Page views on my photos were declining for a while, but they were always significant. Today I probably average about 14,000 views a day per Flickr’s stat program. That’s probably up 20% or so for me since the beginning of the year.

I think that there are tons of people who are still quite active on Flickr and will be for a very long time, even if overall traffic has been down for the site with people being pulled away by competition.

Flickr has the Getty deal which is pretty compelling even if the paltry 20% payout to photographers feels unfair. What other site out there will actually *pay* you for photo sharing?