SmugMug, the owner of photo-sharing site Flickr, has let Flickr users and subscribers know in a letter that the website needs more money to stay alive. The company is asking users to pump more money into it by purchasing a Pro subscription.
SmugMug’s CEO, Don MacAskill, said in the letter that his company cannot continue with Flickr as it is today, as it continues to run at a loss. That writes, among others, TechCrunch, which received the letter and published it in its entirety. MacAskill says he’s not fishing for donations and that every Flickr Pro subscription “contributes directly to keeping Flickr alive.” Such a subscription costs 50 dollars per year, although such an annual subscription is now also offered with a temporary discount of 25 percent.
MacAskill does not clarify exactly how high the need is at Flickr, nor does he say anything about how much his company paid in April last year for the then acquisition of Flickr. The CEO says Flickr is already losing much less money than before, thanks in part to “hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members who have subscribed to Flickr Pro.” But the income is not high enough, he says. He argues that more Flickr Pro members are needed to keep the ship afloat and that Flickr can no longer continue if it remains loss-making.
The CEO describes the acquisition of Flickr as a ‘great risk’, but that SmugMug stepped in last year and thus ‘saved Flickr’. MacAskill says that with SmugMug, he couldn’t see Flickr disappearing and that he didn’t buy the website expecting it to be a cash cow. “Unlike platforms like Facebook, we didn’t buy the website to invade your privacy and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers and photography,” MacAskill said.
According to the SmugMug CEO, Flickr has more than 100 million accounts, but in his eyes there are too few paying users. Before the takeover, Flickr was already working to encourage users to take a Pro account, for example by making the non-manual upload tool only available to these paying members. At the beginning of this year, the website started removing photos from free accounts if they contain more than a thousand images. Users of those accounts could download the superfluous photos or take out a paid account, where that limit does not apply. Until November of last year, free accounts had a terabyte of photo storage, but that was reduced to a limit of 1,000 photos.