Flickr provides a service to peolpe to allow them to host images and share them with other people, why should people expect to be paid for using a service?
It's not people 'giving' Flickr content, it's people using the service Flickr provides because they find it useful and think it's quite good....
I use Google everyday, they don't pay me for that. I make web sites, they get listed on Google, Google don't pay me for that. They are 'scraping' my content (in the same way MSN and Yahoo! do for instance) to use in their index, but they don't pay me for using my content. In their case, it's not even that I give them my content, unless I say otherwise with a robots.txt file, they will take it anyway.
Why do I put up with it and not expect them to pay me? Because other people use their services and find my web sites through them.
Hosting ads is a different thing altogether IMHO. If I was hosting ads for Flickr, then yeah I'd expect someone to be paying me :) I wouldn't expect them to pay for providing me with a useful service.
scobleizer
· 4 years ago
Yeah, but Flickr without any photos really isn't anything. So, it's your photos that are valuable to the service too.
It's a great business model when you get users to do the important work for you for free and then you can put ads up next to that work.
Like I said, Flickr was the business deal of the year. Maybe the decade.
Srijith
· 4 years ago
>>but Flickr without any photos really isn’t anything. So, it’s your photos that are valuable to the service too.
True, but your photos without a service like Flickr will most probably not have much audience. I could have understood the argument if pro users had to see ads and if users had to see ads around pro users' snaps. Since this is not the case, the logic does not go all the way.
paul
· 4 years ago
Profiting from user generated content is Web 2.0 colonialism.
Thomas Hawk
· 4 years ago
I'm one of those photographers on Flickr who is supposedly getting ripped off at Flickr (per Anil). Nothing could be further from the truth. At present I think I get around 1,000 to 2,000 views of my photostream there daily and have had several of my photographs rank in their "interestingness" category. I'd guess that based on my Flickr traffic I'm in the top 1% of photographers on the site by way of traffic.
For those of you who have not experienced the Flickr community in all it's glory it's really something pretty amazaing and unique. Stewart and Caterina are as involved as anyone in the community and I do not believe their involvement is simply about getting paid. Most of the top photographers at Flickr are there primarily out of the joy of their photography and Flickr gives us a unique ability to share that joy in a extremely strong community focused around our passion.
This being said I'm reposting a comment I left yesterday on Om Malik's blog regarding my own thoughts as a photographer on Flickr as well as a link to a story I wrote on the subject after seeing Anil and Caterina's posts:
"There are a number of ways Flickr users benefit even if not directly in an economic sense for their contribution.
1. Flickr allows users to build an audience for their work which can potentially be monetized later (and don’t underestimate what Flickr might come up with).
2. They provide bandwidth that small websites can’t always afford for bandwidth intensive high res photos. I was bounced off my website once when Boing Boing covered a Disneyland photo essay that I did. Cory was able to redirect people to the same photoset at Flickr where they paid for the bandwidth not me.
3. Exposure both now and in the future (especially with a possible greater integration into Yahoo! image search) can provide for outside economic gain. (example, I sold a photo for $500 to Choice Point hotels for a television commercial that they found on Google Image Search — although it wasn’t found on Flickr, Flickr has the potential to overtake Google Image Search as the best image search engine on the internet)
4. Most significantly, Flickr offers a vehicle for interacting and sharing art with others in a selfless way — complete with total ownership of images posted by their members and the ability to creative commons license their photos. I’ve received a great deal of joy from the knowledge that my own photos are enjoyed by others. In fact, to the extent that images of mine in a creative commons world become popular, this may in fact enhance their economic or artistic value for commercial use in the long run.
There is something to be said for the psychic income of providing enjoyment purely for the benefit of others. I’ve had several people ask to use my photos for everything from The San Francisco Ethics commission website to a non-profit film festival, to a first time unknown author for his novel cover, etc. I’ve been told by many people that they use my photos for wallpaper and it’s great to know that I can share a little bit of my craft.
5. Through the social interaction part of Flickr I’ve met some really cool people — especially through Flickr meetups and the group delteme uncensored (which is a little bit of an outlawish rouge type of group on Flickr but with a truly wonderful cast of characters).
It’s also interesting to note that I still have not even paid Flickr for my Flickr Pro account. My current Pro account was gifted to me by RoudyBob (another selfless act).
I give a lot of myself and share a lot of my work in the Flickr community — if they benefit I’m glad because I get every bit as much out of the relationship as they do."
Olá amizade. Mem nome é Ernísio Martines Dias. Sou um sujeito calmo, boadacaco, mas de uma hora para outra posso me tornar agressivo se percebo que não estou conseguindo o que quero. Reconheço que sou mesmo um mau caráter, desonesto e sem escrúpulos, que só penso em ganhar dinheiro à custa dos outros, em ter lucro financeiro em tudo, como sonegar impostos e enganar as pessoas com minha lábia na. Eu mesmo acredito na mentira que eu digo a todo o momento e acabo procurando fazer as coisas por baixo dos panos, pelo modo que me parece ser mais fácil. Há antídoto para um marginal corrupto? Aceito sugestões construtivas no meu e-mail ernisio@vba.com.br Sabe, me sinto com duas faces. A outra é diferente, pois quando não estou trabalhando na VBA, me sinto frágil e até estou com tendência a gostar de homens. Isso é agonizante! Por tudo isso, acabo tendo depressão e insônia, mas ainda estou com esperanças de mudar esta minha vida para melhor e conto com a sua ajuda. Obrigado.
nickstarr
· 4 years ago
Not only all of that with Flickr, but they are also now blocking sites from linking to them. They have blocked the referral from my site FlickrLicio.us with no warning or explination at all.
My site is an extension of a Flickr API, and isn't web 2.0 (which includes Flickr and social networking) all about using the sites beyond what they were intentioned thru API's?
Flickr has yet to comment on the reason behind blocking my site.
Um, how many people make $10K per month in ads? What is the mean amount of Google ads per user? I doubt its anywhere near $10K/month...sounds like one of those scams where some big shot on an informercial says "You can make UP TO $200K per year!" and then people fall for it and it turns out that's nowhere near what people actually do make...
Dare Obasanjo
· 4 years ago
Robert, Flickr provides a service to their customers. They give them web hosting for their photos for free in exchange for placing ads on their photos. This seems like a typical buyerseller relationship that has been the pillar of marketplaces since the dawn of civilization.
If people don't like getting image hosting on Flickr for free then there are a bunch of other services they can pay for that will gladly host their photos without putting up ads.
I think your arguments here are full of BS but then again you've been hanging around Silly Valley all week. ;)
Myron Kassaraba
· 4 years ago
This has been tried before and quite frankly it can get in the way of a good community.
Tripod/Angelfire had an ad revenue share model that was made available to the top 10% of their sites that generated 90% of their traffic. Granted, this was in the days when quantity of eyeballs/pageviews was more imporant than quality of the content since there were advertisers willing to pay $8/1000 for pretty useless and ineffective inventory.
There will be places on the web where it will make sense for the contributor of user generated content to be compensated for the economic gain of the distributor (Weblogsinc.com for example). This will however change the nature of what the service is doing and its relationship with both its readers and contributors.
One way a site like Flickr could share the wealth would be to let viewers buy prints/photos from members and do a revenue share. Maybe a subscription service to private collections (this works for Webshots). In the end, it is true that without user's pictures Flickr is not...... though without Flickr, many thousands of users would not have a place to express themselves through their photos to a large audience and to make connections with a community of other people who like to also express themselves with sharing their photos. Seems like a pretty fair trade to me.
That is a model that works for Thomas Hawk (who BTW is a great photographer who I would pay to subscribe to his photos!) and a great many other Flickr users. I think that is one of the major reasons that there was such a visceral reaction to the Yahoo login on Flickr - the fear that somehow this balance was going to be upset.
Christian Burns
· 4 years ago
We have been using flickr seriously for about 9 months and just upgraded to a Pro account last night. Their free account adds great value to bloggers but once you start to become active in their community and have more than 200 photos in your stream, you start to feel the pull of needing to pay the $24.99
Once you are over 200 photos your links do not break, permalinks are still permanant, but you just cant see them in your photo stream.
Smoove D
· 4 years ago
Why bother with Flikr at all? With Pixelpost and $3.95 a month, I can host a photoblog with no ads and be in total control of my content and add features I want (like ordering prints). Best of all, I get to keep all the revenue I generate from monetizing clicks. This isn't the dialup age, hosting and bandwidth really don't cost much.
Jake
· 4 years ago
I use Flickr and I second what Thomas Hawk has stated - except I'm not in their upper 1% of photographers.
To me, the value they provide is tremendous: for $2/month, I get off site on-line storage of 20 GB (and growing) of my photo images, another 1-2 GB of bandwidth for downloads/views of images among friends, family, and total strangers, the opportunity to show photos to audience that shares interests, a growing enjoyment from participation in new social communities, and the pleasure of pulling photos out of the shoebox and getting them seen.
Not Flickr or Web (gack) 2.0 specific, ads on user created content is nothing new: what is the business model behind webmail -- I've had ads on Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail for a looonnnnggg time. Same with the group systems and message boards (for instance Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Finance message boards). These systems are chock full of millions of messages of user created content that have gathered 100s of millions of eyeballs, billions of page views, and have been spewing ads to us for nearly 10 years. I haven't received my check yet for them and I get far less out of them than Flickr.
Jake
· 4 years ago
I find it interesting that the "community" wants to defeat comment spam, defeat sploggers, defeat click fraud - users who are gaming systems that are designed to pay them - and at the same time create new systems that pay users.
I have nothing against making money, but I'll side with Caterina - sometimes money is not the only motivator for participation. Unless you bring money into the equation. Then you will quickly find that it is the leading motivator.
Christian Burns
· 4 years ago
Flickr does not put ads on the pages of Pro users.
Ben
· 4 years ago
Maybe let Pro users put their own adsense code on their account pages / photostream?
Anonymous Coward
· 4 years ago
"They created business opportunity by being selfish and greedy. Which is sorta funny, when you think about it, isn’t it?"
Man, I've never seen that before. ::snicker:: I mean, there's no company that would do THAT. Nothing like... oh, say, Micros--
... I should have stopped while I was ahead.
Isofarro
· 4 years ago
Replaced nouns in Scoble's comment #2:
"Yeah, but Google without any websites really isn't anything. So, it's your websites that are valuable to the service too.
It's a great business model when you get users to do the important work for you for free and then you can put ads up next to that work."
Adrian Lee
· 4 years ago
If you want to make money from you're work, sell it to someone, or host it yourself, pay for the setup/running expenses, and put ads on it yourself. Don't go putting it on a web site that offers a free service to share photos.
If some of the photos are that good, then surely the photographers should be able to sell them?
How about search engines? MSN don't pay me regardless of the number of web pages they may hahve indexed. That's not even 'user contributed work', MSN just comes and takes it unless I tell them not to.
If Flickr should pay me for putting content on they site, then I think MSN, Yahoo! and Google all should as well. How many billions of pages has MSN got indexed now Rob? Paying out for all of them, on top of providing the free search service, setting it all up, maintaining it, might cut into the profit margins a bit eh?
Anil
· 4 years ago
Just to be clear, I don't necessarily think Flickr should be paying people, and I certainly don't think people are getting ripped off by Flickr, which is an excellent service. I'm just curious about the conversation about exchange of value for some people who are doing creative work and building value; That's not most people, who are just trying to communicate.
mariano
· 4 years ago
Come on robert .. all the post is plain nonsense and the final is incredible:
"Or does it mean I should just make an automated script that grabs my interesting photos and posts them to my TypePad blog so that I can put ads on them?"
Sergey Vlasov
· 4 years ago
To pay or - not? Ultimate decision, obviously, is upon Flickr itself. But IMHO, it would be great to Flickr itself, to honor part of its toplist photographers. Flickr anyway doesn't want to pay nothing? Guys, I beleive, there IS room for another Flickr (whatever it will be named)! Let's build another photosharing service. Anybody?
Spy Master
· 4 years ago
Suggest flickr that booger and go to Spy Media www.spymedia.com which previewed Nov 2005 and solves the problem flickr created. It's based on an eBay like commerce system. It also requires every photo to be profiled before selling and news relevant before posting which eliminates being a dumping ground for family photos.
All Comments
It's not people 'giving' Flickr content, it's people using the service Flickr provides because they find it useful and think it's quite good....
I use Google everyday, they don't pay me for that.
I make web sites, they get listed on Google, Google don't pay me for that. They are 'scraping' my content (in the same way MSN and Yahoo! do for instance) to use in their index, but they don't pay me for using my content. In their case, it's not even that I give them my content, unless I say otherwise with a robots.txt file, they will take it anyway.
Why do I put up with it and not expect them to pay me? Because other people use their services and find my web sites through them.
Hosting ads is a different thing altogether IMHO. If I was hosting ads for Flickr, then yeah I'd expect someone to be paying me :) I wouldn't expect them to pay for providing me with a useful service.
It's a great business model when you get users to do the important work for you for free and then you can put ads up next to that work.
Like I said, Flickr was the business deal of the year. Maybe the decade.
True, but your photos without a service like Flickr will most probably not have much audience. I could have understood the argument if pro users had to see ads and if users had to see ads around pro users' snaps. Since this is not the case, the logic does not go all the way.
For those of you who have not experienced the Flickr community in all it's glory it's really something pretty amazaing and unique. Stewart and Caterina are as involved as anyone in the community and I do not believe their involvement is simply about getting paid. Most of the top photographers at Flickr are there primarily out of the joy of their photography and Flickr gives us a unique ability to share that joy in a extremely strong community focused around our passion.
This being said I'm reposting a comment I left yesterday on Om Malik's blog regarding my own thoughts as a photographer on Flickr as well as a link to a story I wrote on the subject after seeing Anil and Caterina's posts:
"There are a number of ways Flickr users benefit even if not directly in an economic sense for their contribution.
1. Flickr allows users to build an audience for their work which can potentially be monetized later (and don’t underestimate what Flickr might come up with).
2. They provide bandwidth that small websites can’t always afford for bandwidth intensive high res photos. I was bounced off my website once when Boing Boing covered a Disneyland photo essay that I did. Cory was able to redirect people to the same photoset at Flickr where they paid for the bandwidth not me.
3. Exposure both now and in the future (especially with a possible greater integration into Yahoo! image search) can provide for outside economic gain. (example, I sold a photo for $500 to Choice Point hotels for a television commercial that they found on Google Image Search — although it wasn’t found on Flickr, Flickr has the potential to overtake Google Image Search as the best image search engine on the internet)
4. Most significantly, Flickr offers a vehicle for interacting and sharing art with others in a selfless way — complete with total ownership of images posted by their members and the ability to creative commons license their photos. I’ve received a great deal of joy from the knowledge that my own photos are enjoyed by others. In fact, to the extent that images of mine in a creative commons world become popular, this may in fact enhance their economic or artistic value for commercial use in the long run.
There is something to be said for the psychic income of providing enjoyment purely for the benefit of others. I’ve had several people ask to use my photos for everything from The San Francisco Ethics commission website to a non-profit film festival, to a first time unknown author for his novel cover, etc. I’ve been told by many people that they use my photos for wallpaper and it’s great to know that I can share a little bit of my craft.
5. Through the social interaction part of Flickr I’ve met some really cool people — especially through Flickr meetups and the group delteme uncensored (which is a little bit of an outlawish rouge type of group on Flickr but with a truly wonderful cast of characters).
It’s also interesting to note that I still have not even paid Flickr for my Flickr Pro account. My current Pro account was gifted to me by RoudyBob (another selfless act).
I give a lot of myself and share a lot of my work in the Flickr community — if they benefit I’m glad because I get every bit as much out of the relationship as they do."
http://thomashawk.com/2005/10/flickr-caterina-f...
Paul
My site is an extension of a Flickr API, and isn't web 2.0 (which includes Flickr and social networking) all about using the sites beyond what they were intentioned thru API's?
Flickr has yet to comment on the reason behind blocking my site.
http://www.nickstarr.com/2005/10/27/flickr-does...
Flickr provides a service to their customers. They give them web hosting for their photos for free in exchange for placing ads on their photos. This seems like a typical buyerseller relationship that has been the pillar of marketplaces since the dawn of civilization.
If people don't like getting image hosting on Flickr for free then there are a bunch of other services they can pay for that will gladly host their photos without putting up ads.
I think your arguments here are full of BS but then again you've been hanging around Silly Valley all week. ;)
Tripod/Angelfire had an ad revenue share model that was made available to the top 10% of their sites that generated 90% of their traffic. Granted, this was in the days when quantity of eyeballs/pageviews was more imporant than quality of the content since there were advertisers willing to pay $8/1000 for pretty useless and ineffective inventory.
There will be places on the web where it will make sense for the contributor of user generated content to be compensated for the economic gain of the distributor (Weblogsinc.com for example). This will however change the nature of what the service is doing and its relationship with both its readers and contributors.
One way a site like Flickr could share the wealth would be to let viewers buy prints/photos from members and do a revenue share. Maybe a subscription service to private collections (this works for Webshots). In the end, it is true that without user's pictures Flickr is not...... though without Flickr, many thousands of users would not have a place to express themselves through their photos to a large audience and to make connections with a community of other people who like to also express themselves with sharing their photos. Seems like a pretty fair trade to me.
That is a model that works for Thomas Hawk (who BTW is a great photographer who I would pay to subscribe to his photos!) and a great many other Flickr users. I think that is one of the major reasons that there was such a visceral reaction to the Yahoo login on Flickr - the fear that somehow this balance was going to be upset.
Once you are over 200 photos your links do not break, permalinks are still permanant, but you just cant see them in your photo stream.
To me, the value they provide is tremendous: for $2/month, I get off site on-line storage of 20 GB (and growing) of my photo images, another 1-2 GB of bandwidth for downloads/views of images among friends, family, and total strangers, the opportunity to show photos to audience that shares interests, a growing enjoyment from participation in new social communities, and the pleasure of pulling photos out of the shoebox and getting them seen.
Not Flickr or Web (gack) 2.0 specific, ads on user created content is nothing new: what is the business model behind webmail -- I've had ads on Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail for a looonnnnggg time. Same with the group systems and message boards (for instance Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Finance message boards). These systems are chock full of millions of messages of user created content that have gathered 100s of millions of eyeballs, billions of page views, and have been spewing ads to us for nearly 10 years. I haven't received my check yet for them and I get far less out of them than Flickr.
I have nothing against making money, but I'll side with Caterina - sometimes money is not the only motivator for participation. Unless you bring money into the equation. Then you will quickly find that it is the leading motivator.
Man, I've never seen that before. ::snicker:: I mean, there's no company that would do THAT. Nothing like... oh, say, Micros--
... I should have stopped while I was ahead.
"Yeah, but Google without any websites really isn't anything. So, it's your websites that are valuable to the service too.
It's a great business model when you get users to do the important work for you for free and then you can put ads up next to that work."
If some of the photos are that good, then surely the photographers should be able to sell them?
How about search engines? MSN don't pay me regardless of the number of web pages they may hahve indexed. That's not even 'user contributed work', MSN just comes and takes it unless I tell them not to.
If Flickr should pay me for putting content on they site, then I think MSN, Yahoo! and Google all should as well. How many billions of pages has MSN got indexed now Rob? Paying out for all of them, on top of providing the free search service, setting it all up, maintaining it, might cut into the profit margins a bit eh?
"Or does it mean I should just make an automated script that grabs my interesting photos and posts them to my TypePad blog so that I can put ads on them?"
Flickr anyway doesn't want to pay nothing? Guys, I beleive, there IS room for another Flickr (whatever it will be named)! Let's build another photosharing service. Anybody?