Breaking: Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

I am at the annual Outcast CEO Dinner event - Brad Garlinghouse (Yahoo SVP Communications & Communities) and Stewart Butterfield (Cofounder Flickr) are sitting at my table and told me that they will announce the closure of Yahoo Photos tomorrow. The actual closure will occur over the next few months, they say.

The service will be shut down in favor of the newer and more social Flickr, which they acquired in March of 2005. There has long been an issue at Yahoo where newer services have competed with older services, and Yahoo has finally taken some strong action to getting their house in order with a consistent set of product offerings. Garlinghouse has been one of the stronger proponents of this strategy.

Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr - instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly. Most of these services have built special tools to transition users, Butterfield said. Users will also be able to download full sized original photos, or order CDs and prints at a discount to the normal price. “We have no interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr” Butterfield said. “We want happy users.”

Yahoo Photos is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and coincidentally has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.

The first graph below shows only U.S. traffic for Flickr and Yahoo. The table below that shows March Comscore numbers for the worldwide audience.

Site	Unique Visitors(M)
Yahoo! Photos	31.1
Flickr	28.5
Photobucket	28.1
Facebook Photos	23.5

Butterfield also confirmed that Flickr will “soon” allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.

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What Drew Yahoo to Flickr When They Already Had Yahoo! Photos

from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Yahoo Photos director Will Aldrich had earlier denied any plans for merging Yahoo Photos and Flickr. But it was probably not making perfect business sense for Yahoo to manage two competing photo sharing websites under the same umbrella. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield today informed TechCrunch that Yahoo! Photos is shutting shop and all existing Yahoo Photos! users will be migrated to Flickr. They'll also get a one-click option to export Yahoo photos to Photobucket or Shutterfly. And like Picasa and PhotoBucket, video sharing is meeting Flickr soon. I was reading this interesting book - How Innovators Connect - coauthored by Techtribe founder Rohit Agarwal and journalist Patricia Brown, where they have interviews and success stories of Silicon Valley veterans like investor Ram Shriram of Google, Ashish Gupta of Junglee, Subrah Iyer of WebEx and many more entrepreneurs. Here's an excerpt from the same book, using the current example of Flickr, that suggests "timing" can play a crucial role in the success of a company. Makes perfect sense. Time to market, Be a trend spotter In 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr, a Vancouver, British Columbia based company that lets users upload digital pictures from computers and cameras, and arrange their photos into albums and include them in blogs and other postings. Timing was critical in this acquisition for a number of reasons, says Bradley Horowitz, VP of product strategy at Yahoo, and the primary coordinator of the acquisition. Yahoo already had the world's most successful online photo site in 2005. But there are something Yahoo saw in a small company of just a dozen people: Their ability to build a community - or ecosystem - around the concept of photography was scalable. Flickr recognized the new keywords - social networking, interaction, and ubiquitous broadband. The Flickr founders simply connected the dots in a timely fashion. Yahoo's Horowitz says there were four specific factors that drew him to Flickr: 1. User Generated Content - This was not new to Yahoo. Yahoo had been soliciting user generated content through Geocities for years - but it had not generated the mass appeal that was driving the Flickr buzz. 2. User Annotated Content - Although Yahoo had billions of photos up in its section called Yahoo Photos, most of them didn't have "metadata" built around them. In essence, Yahoo created a huge digital shoebox with billions of people's photos, while Flickr offered users the ability to organized their photos in a sophisticated and intuitive manner using tagging technologies. Flickr made it much easier for common people to add metadata to the photos. As a result, roughly 85 percent of the photos in Flickr were tagged or annotated with some human entered metadata. 3. Community Distribution - Following the open-source model, Flickr encourage its members to share photos among its community. Yahoo and other companies at the time went to extraordinary lengths to preclude people from using the photos that lived on its servers outside the context of the Yahoo! environment. The Flickr model turned Yahoo's business model on its head. Instead of positioning Yahoo as the destination site for these images, Flickr allowed Yahoo to pay for the storage and bandwidth, while encourage third-party sites - mainly bloggers - to use that content. Tens of thousands of bloggers began to use Flickr as their imaging backbone, Horowitz says. This drove up awareness and dependency on the Yahoo site after the Flickr acquisition. 4. Platform Distribution - Flickr delivered a great end-user service. But it also delivered the services and facilities that allowed the community of developers to continue enhancing their own services. In effect, they had developers that were not on the payroll building enhancements - like the Flickr Macintosh coupler - at no cost to Yahoo!. Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield developed an ecosystem that was possible only because of specific trends occurring in the market at the time of their innovative thinking process. Flickr's innovators created an environment in which millions of people contributed and distributed photos while a combination of Flickr's internal team and external collaborators created new offerings. "That's the leverage you get when take a risk and trust that people are creative, and trust in the idea that many people can do more than just a few," Horowitz says.

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YouTube Launches Revenue Sharing Partners Program, but no Pre-Rolls

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

The news, first broken by Om Malik and now live on the YouTube Blog, that YouTube has launched a revenue sharing Partners Program for its top content creators is a positive step forward for a service that only made $15 million in revenue last year, despite a purchase price of $1.5 billion.

What is notably missing from the announcement is the inclusion of pre-rolls, or similar in-video advertising inclusions for the new YouTube partners, who include LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary.

We’ve covered rumors about the introduction of in-video advertising previously, in January Steve Poland noted the BBC reporting that the advertising on YouTube may take the form of 3 second pre-rolls, but some 4 months later, still nothing.

That’s where we could leave it, if it weren’t for the fact that not only is YouTube not showing a great ROI for Google financially, but the new Partners Program only goes as far as monetizing the actual YouTube page destination with Adsense units. Whilst not without merit, the new program is limited given the way YouTube content is consumed. The great strength of YouTube from its earliest days has been the use of embedded video on external sites: a large number, if not a majority of viewers will never see the advertising, viewing it only on blogs and forums which if they are running Google Adsense units, do so in a way that does not benefit the content creator.

Red Herring reported in April that YouTube was looking to introduce pre-rolls over Summer, but limited to only premium publisher content. Whilst the premium content is a strong driver of traffic to YouTube, YouTube’s sole focus on it for the introduction of in-video advertising would ignore the long tail of user generated and submitted content that was the real driving force for the site in the days prior to Google and its formal content distribution agreements, and as many would argue still is.

The question naturally is why? Why not roll out the option of in-video/ pre-roll advertising to all YouTube content creators? Whilst advertising may not be welcome by every one, Google knows the advertising market and it can credit much of its financial success to date to its inclusive embrace of content creators: Google Adsense today maintains its clear lead due to the broad expanse of publishers worldwide that have not only embraced the program, but were actually able to participate in it, Yahoo’s YPN remains an invite/ United States publishers only service, and Microsoft AdCenter is…well…there, but doing nothing in terms of embracing the long tail.

If technology is to blame, in that Google still hasn’t sorted out the tech behind the delivery of in-video advertising, you’d then ask why the delay, is this Google’s Panama? Google Video did exist prior to the YouTube acquisition so it’s not like they’ve only had since September to start work on the technology, and given that smaller startups including sites such as Revver can do it…well I guess there’s always the off chance of yet another video oriented acquisition.

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The Future of Image Search Belongs to Social Search

from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection by Thomas Hawk Well, image search is one of the hardest types of search (audio and video aren't so easy either). With text search, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have their proprietary algorithms where they look for text on a page, see who links to a page, etc. etc. words are in contrast to images much easier to figure out. If Mike Arrington is mentioned 40 times in a post by a highly ranked internet site, then the article probably has some authority to be placed in the results for an article about Mike Arrington. But photos of Mike Arrington are a different matter. It is very difficult for image search engines to get at what's inside a photo and how good a quality photo it is. Accordingly, image search engines that rely solely on algorithms without any human filtering fall flat compared to results that are filtered through social networks.

[I'm CEO of Zooomr, we are building both a social based image search system as well as a stock photography platform] Live Image Search advances | Larry Larsen | Channel 10 Larry Larsen over at Channel 10 blogs today about some recent enhancements that Microsoft has made to their image search technology and suggests that they have "greatly enhanced relevance," and as such deserve a "day off." Unfortunately, I'm going to have to disagree. While I like the fact that Microsoft claims an increase in speed on how fast their images load, the relevancy of their results still pale significantly in comparison to what can be done with social search. This is not the first time that I've blogged about this and it won't be the last. The future of image search very much belongs to social search. What do I mean by this? Well, image search is one of the hardest types of search (audio and video aren't so easy either). With text search, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all have their proprietary algorithms where they look for text on a page, see who links to a page, etc. etc. words are in contrast to images much easier to figure out. If Mike Arrington is mentioned 40 times in a post by a highly ranked internet site, then the article probably has some authority to be placed in the results for an article about Mike Arrington. But photos of Mike Arrington are a different matter. It is very difficult for image search engines to get at what's inside a photo and how good a quality photo it is. Accordingly, image search engines that rely solely on algorithms without any human filtering fall flat compared to results that are filtered through social networks. To see what I mean lets look at some examples: Mike Arrington, Flickr Mike Arrington, "new and improved" live.com Mike Arrington, Yahoo Image Search Mike Arrington, Google Image Search Mike Arrington, Ask.com Summer, Flickr Summer, "new and improved" live.com Summer, Yahoo Image Search Summer, Google Image Search Summer, Ask.com (I particularly appreciated the relevance of that third row result on Flickr). Brunette, Flickr Brunette, "new and improved" live.com Brunette, Yahoo Image Search Brunette, Google Image Search Brunette, Ask.com (ok, so which would you like to date the most, isn't the difference between Ask and Yahoo dramatic?) Africa, Flickr Africa, "new and improved" live.com Africa, Yahoo Image Search Africa, Google Image Search Africa, Ask.com As you can see from the examples above, the higher quality, better caliber images generally come from Flickr. Flickr's results are screened through their social network. The users validate which photos are best by their social activity around the photographs. Users also tag photos to better identify what's inside the photo. Yahoo's image search is largely the worst. This is the future of image search. It is also, by the way, the future of the $2.5 billion stock photography market. Comparable searches between Getty Images, Corbis and Flickr would produce comparable results. This is why we are working on building the best stock photography search engine in the world on Zooomr right now. It will certainly have application for broader more generic public image search, but it most certainly will be the future of the stock photography business as well.

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Virtual World Revenues, $6 Billion by 2012

from GigaOM by Wagner James Au David Cole of DFC Intelligence, a game industry expert for years, has been a guiding source for me for years, and he just revealed some astonishing numbers about the MMOG market: “I can let you be the first person we tell that we forecast the worldwide MMOG market going from $2.2 billion in 2006 to $5.9 billion in 2012,” he e-mails me. These figures are part of an upcoming DFC report, and they are bullish in the extreme. For proportion’s sake, bear in mind that the entire computer/videogame industry is currently a $7.4 billion business. “In terms of overall growth,” Cole continues, “the market in both North America and Europe is expected to triple.” Furthermore, over $2.3 billion of that revenue is expected to come from advertising and digital distribution of virtual items/characters etc, not subscriptions.” This would be quite a reversal, for most Western MMOs still rely on a monthly subscription model. The DFC forecast, it’s worth noting, is pinned to online games, with some ambiguity on how to count revenue from the numerous virtual worlds on the market or about to be launched; many are social hangouts or user-created collaborative spaces, and not games in the strict sense of having pre-defined goals, levels of success, and so on. “Does MySpace count?” Cole asks rhetorically. “Every free site that has an avatar?” (Many online worlds are free to the user, and depend on external advertising deals for revenue.) DFC’s solution for virtual worlds, he goes on, was to only count user-to-company payments. “If you can get them to pay a subscription fee or get them to buy items in a virtual world… for those consumers that starts to become a game.” With those services, he says, “[W]e would count the subscription and virtual item revenue, but not any ad revenue they generate.”

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