Yahoo COO Daniel L. Rosenweig on the Future of Flickr

[Disclaimer: I am the Evangelist and CEO for the site Zooomr]

"I will talk about the inventory glut. It has definitely been a huge change. You can see from the page views of a lot of the social media sites that exist today. That is going to change the market dynamics. What we hope is that it is going to bring in whole new categories of advertisers who have been focused mostly on the search side to be able to bring them to the other side of the kinds of advertising that is capable.

From our standpoint, we want to be able to take advantage of that marketplace. We think we can continue to build our premium environments by continuing to have the highest rate of growth, the highest targeting, most engaged audiences. But there are many new players and there are alternatives in the market, so what we have to do is continue to adjust and evolve to take advantage of those and to build packaging that marketers cannot get elsewhere.

From our standpoint, we are going to move ahead as the market leader and better position ourselves to take advantage of this new inventory and this new market opportunity. We have products like Answers. We have products like Flickr that are not yet really monetized right now. But we have assets that nobody else has and we plan to leverage those assets, so those assets are not only the quality of our audience, which I think is debatable in some of these other environments, but our targeting capability of not only the environments that they are in, but our profiles of being able to know who they are and that is why our large registered audience base, which continues to grow, is becoming so important.

That user data about who they are and what they have done, and to be able to put ads in different formats and different kinds of buying capabilities into the contextually relevant environment. Of course, we do have we believe the world’s best sales team, who has the best relationships to be able to help shepherd the large marketers into this marketplace.

I think there is going to be a glut for a while. I think there will be a transition for a while, but I think in the end, our assets and our leadership will ultimately help us take the greatest amount of advantage of that opportunity."

Daniel L. Rosensweig, Chief Operating Officer, Yahoo

You can read the whole call over at Seeking Alpha here, but it is interesting to see where Yahoo! is headed with Flickr and I'd assume the other various social networking sites that they are acquiring.

It's not really a surprise to me that the decision has been made to largely *not* monetize these businesses today and instead let them grow while Yahoo creates the "highest targeted and engaged audiences" for monetizing later.

Flickr of course is their crown jewel of all of their social networking sites. In yesterday's call the word Flickr was used five times. Delicious was used once. WebJay and Upcoming were not mentioned at all. In the previous quarter's conference call Flickr was not mentioned once.

The number of 20 million visitors was also given as Flickr's current monthly traffic. Since Flickr today has roughly 5.5 million registered users (and you must be registerd to upload photos) this means that many more visitors are coming to the site to consume photos rather than to add their own.

"Waaaaaaaah!! I don't want Flickr to change!

Don't forget to breathe. It's not the end, it's the beginning! As the wise woman who taught us The One True Way of Flickr Massage says, the only thing permanent is change. But we're going to stay true to our vision and to the people who made us what we are -- that's you, the Flickr pioneers."

From the Flickr Blog announcing the Yahoo! acquisition back in early 2005

More comments from Flick users on these comments can be found here at Flickr Central Uncensored. This story was also Slashdotted and more comments can be read here.