Yahoo! terminates photo service to focus on Flickr
Users of Yahoo Photo are now encouraged to turn to Flickr asYahoo has decided to close on 20 September 2007 the weakest of its two photo sharing services. The move follows months of decline for Yahoo Photo and a rise in Flickr market share.
“We've decided to focus all our efforts on Flickr - the award winning photo sharing community. Why not head over to Flickr for a look?,” reads a statement on Yahoo Photo.
Yahoo hopes with the closure of Yahoo Photo, it will catch up with Photobucket, its main competitor on the photo-sharing market. Yahoo bought Flickr in March 2005.
The move follows months of decline for Yahoo Photo which is now the fifth photography website in the US according to monitoring company Hitwise with 3.19 per cent of the visits to photo sharing sites.
Photobucket and Flickr are on top of the charts with 43.52 per cent and 6.42 per cent according Hitwise rankings. In the past months Flickr has seen its market share significantly increase, up from 4.57 per cent in March.
The rise in market share for Flickr is not only due to the closure of Yahoo Photo but also to the integration of Flickr images in Yahoo Search at the end of June. Yahoo! Search, Sr. Product Manager Ujwal Tickoo said “Now when you use Yahoo! Image Search, in addition to the billions of images we crawl from the Web, users have access to over 300 million images from the amazing community of photographers on Flickr”
Users trying to log in on Yahoo Photo are now welcomed with a message inviting them to opt for other photo-sharing services. “We're sorry. Yahoo! Photos is closing on September 20, 2007 so we are no longer accepting new accounts or allowing users to upload photos if you don't already have photos in your account,” reads the warning.
“For some time now we’ve supported two great photo sharing services, Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end”.
Yahoo Photo users have three options to move their photographs to other services which include Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Photobucket. Other options include downloading – one by one due to technical limitations – the pictures locally to ensure they will not be deleted by the closure or ordering an archive CD for users of the New Yahoo! Photos.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/photos/photos3/closing/closing-01.html
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9741873-7.html
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2007/07/flickr_traffic_up_38_in_past_f.html
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000466.html
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/photos/photos3/closing/
http://news.com.com/Yahoo+buys+photo-sharing+site+Flickr/2100-1038_3-5627640.html