Month: January 2011

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Washington State Firefighter “Fireman Johnny” Has His Account Deleted by Flickr

I was disappointed this weekend to learn that a friend of mine and fellow DMU member “Fireman Johnny” had his long-standing Flickr account of 5 years deleted without warning by Flickr Friday night.

Johnny is a Washington State firefighter who was very active in our DMU group where he could always be counted on to tell us great stories about what real life as a firefighter was like. In addition to being active in our DMU group, Johnny also administered two other groups on Flickr. One that warned about the dangers of drinking and driving and another “The Brave Soldiers and the families who support them” which was a central place for military families to come talk about issues. Now that Johnny’s been deleted, he can no longer administer this group which was very important to him and a number of families of American soldiers who went there for support.

Johnny’s as genuine a guy as they come.

So why did Flickr nuke Johnny’s account?

This is Flickr’s official answer back to him:

Hello,

Flickr account “Fireman Johnny” was deleted by Flickr staff for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.

http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

# Do play nice.
We’re a community of many types of people, who all have the right to feel comfortable and who may not think what you think, believe what you believe or see what you see. So, be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members.

# Don’t vent your frustrations, rant, or bore the brains out of other members.
Flickr is not a venue for you to harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we’ll send you a warning or terminate your account.

DMU group discussion titled “NEW! Level 3 Sexual Offender Moves In Nearby…Oh how charming!”

-Flickr staff

The thread referenced by Flickr has also been deleted from Flickr now as well.

And what was the thread about?

Johnny was upset that a level 3 sex offender (the worst 3% of all offenders) with previous convictions for child molestation had moved into his neighborhood next to a school. Johnny was upset by this and so he posted a thread about this in DMU on Flickr along with the molester’s *publicly available information* from a state run sex offender registry. The registry is public information and anyone can access it here.

The registry has no stipulation against sharing or republishing the information and in fact even has a “tell a friend” button right on the form where you can put in a friend’s email address and have the entry sent to them automatically.

In the thread Johnny never threatened anyone. He simply posted the public info sheet on this sex offender (freely available to anyone on the internet) and then talked about his frustration with the situation in his neighborhood. But apparently he violated Flickr’s policy against “venting ones frustrations online.”

Because Flickr has no undo account deletion, Johnnys 5-year account is now permanently erased.

Fireman Johnny has started a new Flickr account as Firefighter Johnny, but unfortunately his previous five years, including all his photos and entire digital existence on Flickr have been wiped completely off of planet Flickr.

I quite honestly don’t know what to do about these reckless and random account deletions that seem to be happening more and more frequently on Flickr. If Fireman Johnny can be deleted, any of us can be deleted. Being upset about a level 3 sex offender and posting about it on Flickr absolutely should not get your account deleted. Johnny was upset that this guy moved into his neighborhood right by an elementary school. That’s a natural reaction. He shared his upsetting news in a thread on Flickr and whamo, the Flickr police nuked his account right out from underneath him.

Another DMU brother hits the dust, and a good one at that.

That sucks.

Blake Irving, if you really care about Flickr like you claimed Friday in your tweet, you’ll fix this mess.

Account deletions should not be immediate, permanent and irrevocable. If we invest thousands of hours of our online lives into Flickr we *deserve* an appeal process. We *deserve* due process before our digital lives are deleted. We *deserve* an opportunity to take self-corrective action before you nuke us out of existence.

We entrust you with our digital lives. Have some respect for the content we bring to Flickr. Have some basic human decency. Because without our content your Flickr is nothing. Flickr only works because of our generosity in sharing our content. Acknowledge that and show us some respect.

Why couldn’t you have just told Johnny that you had a problem with his thread and that if he didn’t delete it you’d nuke him? Why couldn’t you have just nuked the thread and left his account alive? Why destroy a 5-year account, his administration of other important groups and his whole digital life on Flickr?

Johnny didn’t deserve this. Thanks for making Flickr a little bit safer for child molesters and a little bit more hostile and fearful for the rest of us Yahoo.

Nice work indeed Flickr!

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Q. Is Yahoo Committed to Flickr? Yahoo Product Chief Blake Irving Says “Hell Yes”

Q. Is Yahoo Comitted to Flickr

A few hours ago, Yahoo EVP and product Chief Blake Irving sent out a tweet on his Twitter account likely in response to recent questions about Yahoo’s commitment to Flickr. The tweet seems to be a ringing endorsement, at least from Irving, that Yahoo Management *does* in fact value what they have in Flickr.

“Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable.” wrote Irving.

It’s nice to finally see someone from the senior Yahoo ranks actually come out and utter the word Flickr. For a while there I was starting to wonder if they even knew they owned it. Flickr has been conspicuously absent from Yahoo analyst earnings calls and other PR opportunities by Yahoo Management and was starting to feel like some sort of neglected orphan. Layoffs at Flickr last month were at about 8% (about twice the overall 4% Yahoo rate that most press cited). Irving’s statement today at least shows that Yahoo gets that it’s important to show Flickr a little love from time to time.

Now, next, how the hell do we get Irving and his boss Carol Bartz to actually sign up for Flickr and open accounts of their own? You know you’re just chomping at the bit to see the latest snapshots from these two Yahoos.

Thanks Danny for tweeting the Search Engine Land Article!

Update: More from ReadWriteWeb here.

Update #2: Apparently Blake Irving actually does have a flickr account. It doesn’t look like he’s updated it though since August of last year. You’d think his assistant could be more on top of that for him. From the two photos of him that are tagged on Flickr, it looks like he actually visited Flickr HQ July of last year once.

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San Francisco Photowalk, This Sunday at 4pm

Who: You

What: A DMU San Francisco Photowalk

Where: The walk will start outside the Civic Center Muni/BART Station.

We will shoot parts of the Tenderloin District making our way to Downtown to shoot the architecture and other street scenes.

We will plan on having dinner at the Embarcadero Osha.

After dinner we will walk along the Embarcadero towards the Bay Bridge and end up at the High Dive Bar along the Embarcadero for after shoot libation.

Why: To celebrate the arrival of our DMU Admin visiting from the Great Pacific Northwest Adameros.

When: Sunday, January 16, 4pm

You can get more information on the photowalk here (note: you have to have “safe search” turned off on Flickr to be able to see DMU)

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Tagerator for Flickr is Awesome!

Tagerator for Flickr is Awesome!

Are you Flickr OCD like I am?

I’ve been playing with a new app that software developer Jeremy Brooks (the developer of SuprSetr) has built over the past few weeks. Like SuprSetr (which allows you to manage your flickr sets by tags) Tagerator is one of the strongest new tools to help you manage and organize your flickr photos and sets.

You can get Tagerator here.

Tagerator analyzes your entire flickrstream and then returns to you a list of all of the tags that you currently are using on flickr.

Why is this helpful?

Well for starters you can make fun things like the tag cloud that I’ve posted above. It gives people an idea about what your photography is about from a weighted tag perspective. But I’ve found it useful in a lot of other ways as well.

Tagerator allows you to sort your tags on flickr from most used, to least used. By doing this you can get great ideas for new sets that you haven’t made sets for on flickr yet. You might notice that the tag mannequin, or neon, or graffiti, or San Francisco, or whatever has a lot of tags but you haven’t made a set for it yet. This can help you come up with cool new ideas for sets. I noticed that I had 129 of my photos tagged “Pike Place Market,” but didn’t actually have a set for that on my flickr account. Well, now I do! Thanks Tagerator!

Also by looking at your lesser used tags, I found that I’d misspelled a lot of tags. For instance, I have one photo tagged “dinosuar.” This tool helps me identify my misspelled tags and go back and fix them. If you click on the tag it takes you right to search page in your stream for that tag, so you can easily go and fix misspellings. With over 50,000 photos in my own stream, I’ve been able to find dozens of tags that I and others have misspelled, by fixing these tags I make it more likely that my photos will come up properly when people are searching for my photo (as well as makes me look a little more literate than I might be otherwise).

By the way, if you make lots of sets like I do? You’ll probably notice that it sucks that flickr last year started paging your sets on Flickr. Now when you or someone else goes to your sets page they only see your most recent 30 sets. There is a nice hack and workaround though that you may want to bookmark for looking at sets on Flickr. If you add the string

/?page=1&per_page=10000

after any set URL, it will show you all of that user’s sets, not just the most recent 30.

If you want to check the hack out on my sets page, you can see all 1.436 of my flickr sets on one page here.

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How Much Revenue Does Flickr Make From Paid Pro Accounts, My Guess? $50 Million Per Year

Over at Quora today somebody asked the question, How many Flickr accounts are pro accounts? Yahoo doesn’t make the number of accounts or Flickr’s financials public, but I thought I’d just do a brief bit of guessing on my own. Note that this is in no way scientific and probably somebody could use the API or a more detailed sampling to get better results.

The most recent mention of the total number of Flickr users that I’ve seen comes to us from a news release from Yahoo back in November 2009. At that time they were announcing a Flickr/Snapfish deal and in their release they mentioned Flickr’s “more than 40 million members.” While “more than 40 million members could actually be any number greater than 40 million, if we assume that 40 million was close to the number of users at the time this gives us a starting point.

According to compete.com (and take their statistics of course with a grain of salt), since November 2009, Flickr’s traffic has dropped about 18%. So if we reduced the 40 million number by 18%, we get about 32.8 million Flickr accounts. There very well may be more or less, this is just a very rough estimate.

I did a Flickr search for the names “John” and “Jane” and sampled the first 100 accounts of each that came up. Of those accounts 7 were listed as deleted (but still seemed to be on the system), 14 were listed as paid Pro accounts and 179 were free accounts. One might guess then that 7% of Flickr accounts are paid Pro accounts based on this name query. So 7% of 32.8 million would be 2.29 million paid Pro accounts. At $25 per year that would be about $57 million per year in revenue from Pro accounts.

Of course there are other things to think about in this guesswork as well. Some people pay for 2 years of Pro account at once. For these accounts Flickr gets $24 per year not $25.

Also my sample using the names “John” and “Jane” probably have a higher percentage of Pro accounts than they should. Someone using an actual proper name is probably more likely to be a legitimate account and less a free throw away account. In looking at the first 100 profiles simply for a user search by the term “a” (which produced far fewer proper named sounding accounts) the percentage of Pro accounts was far lower.

Given the the fact that my percentages are probably high and some people pay $24 per year instead of $25, I’m going to make a ballpark guess and say that I think Flickr generates about $50 million per year from Pro account subscriptions on about 2.1 million paid Pro accounts per year. Flickr also receives advertising revenue, of course, from free accounts. They also probably get a small cut of the Flickr/Getty stock photography sales as well as minor revenue from things that they do like the Corporate account thing (for companies like Starbucks and McDonalds, Snapfish photo printing, etc.).

On the other side of the equation, Flickr currently has a (smaller recently) staff of about 51 employees according to the “About Flickr” page. They also have the expense associated with storing all of the 5.3 billion photos or so that they store and the bandwidth costs with serving them up, relatively expensive (and soon to be even nicer, with a hot tub) office space in San Francisco and other various expenses. The first time I saw Flickr mention that they were profitable publicly was in a San Francisco Magazine article in April of 2009. (At that time as an aside they quoted 35 million members).

How profitable is Flickr? Your guess is as good as mine. I suspect that after you back out all the costs on their revenue though that it’s not a meaningful or significant number for Yahoo.

Maybe I’m right, maybe I wrong, maybe I’m close, maybe I’m way off, who knows. Note this post only addresses what I’m guessing Flickr makes from *Pro* accounts. Obviously Flickr has other sources of revenue (including advertising).

If anyone has any feedback or sees a way this guess might be improved, let me know in the comments.

Update #1: I did a bit more digging and was able to find this Yahoo page that talks about “advertising opportunities” on Flickr. According to this page at least, Yahoo is claiming that Flickr represents: “a far-reaching community of 51 million registered members.” So my initial guess of 32.8 million would indeed seem to be low. Of course with the reduction over the past year in Flickr’s traffic, it could be that a lot of these are dead or inactive accounts. I should also note that in the comments it was brought up that some of the Pro accounts on Flickr are unpaid Pro accounts and are part of a deal (at least in New Zealand) where users get free Flickr Pro accounts as part of their broadband service. I’d think that these sorts of accounts would not pay very much (if any) revenue directly to Flickr. Yahoo probably benefits in terms of directed traffic from the providers, but probably not in dollars and cents directly to Flickr. I’m not sure what percentage of the Pro accounts on Flickr would be characterized as this type, but I only know of this being done in New Zealand at present.

Yahoo seems to be pitching Flickr as a site that is rich with Millennials (People 15–24) and affluent 18-34 year old men and lists the following advertising opportunities on Flickr:

“Flickr Homepage: Engage members instantly with the first ad they see on Flickr. (Roadblocks available; does not feature expandables or overlays; video must be user initiated.)

Photo Pages: Align your ad placement with striking images.

Search Page: Get high-volume reach—millions of photo searches are conducted daily.

Upload Page: Take advantage of upload downtime, and catch members’ attention while they wait. (an opportunity for Rich Media–enabled video)

Groups Main Page: Capture users as they manage their Flickr groups. Sponsors can also drive traffic to their own groups.

Sponsored Groups: Create a home for your brand on Flickr with an interactive sponsored group. Target and inspire members with a call-to-action rally, compelling them to join the group, share relevant photos, and create buzz around the brand.

API License for Sponsored Groups: Extend the impact and reach of a Flickr sponsored group. Inspire lasting user engagement by feeding group members’ photos onto your own branded sites by using Flickr’s open code.”

Update #2, Cal Henderson (former Flickr Chief Software Architect) suggests over on Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post at Read/Write Web that advertising actually makes up a far greater component of Flickr’s revenue than people might think. This would make sense, but since the most active/affluent flickr members are more likely to have Pro accounts (which don’t see ads) I wonder how valuable Flickr’s ads really are to marketers. Cal says my calculations of flickr’s earnings are “extremely flawed,” and adds:

“1) Ad revenues: Flickr is the 35th biggest traffic’d site on the web, accounting for about 1 in every 500 pages views. It serves *a lot* of ads. Billions a day.

2) Getty: Flickr gets a cut of photos licensed through Getty. This is a non trivial amount.

3) Other partnerships. This is also a non-trivial amount.

I can’t give you any figures, and it’s up to you whether to believe me or not, but pro sales are only a portion of revenues.