Yahoo acquires Ludicorp, the company behind Flickr, in spring 2005. Flickr blog announced the acuqistion in March 20, 2005. Estimation cost is $40 million.
Here is the link to the Flickr blog:
http://blog.flickr.com/en/2005/03/20/yahoo-actually-does-acquire-flickr/
Flickr has been mentioned in class as an example of web 2.0. It provides photo uploading services from users’ computer, and provide blog services and photo posting services. According to Flickr blog, the Flickr will remain the same after acuistion with slightly few changes such as allow yahoo account to log in.
Here is an article by Jim Hu from CNET news.com:
Yahoo has purchased online photo-sharing service Flickr, less than a week after the Internet giant launched a beta test of a new blogging tool.
Vancouver, British Columbia-based Flickr lets users upload digital photos from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post photos to blogs, among other things.
Joanna Stevens, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, confirmed the deal Sunday but did not disclose the terms.
“We look forward to working with them for their innovation and product development across the Yahoo Network in the coming months,” she said.
Stevens said Flickr will remain a standalone site for now. The company’s employees, however, will relocate to Sunnyvale later this year.
Earlier this week, Yahoo announced Yahoo 360. The service combines a new blogging tool, along with several longtime Yahoo products, including instant messaging, photo storage and sharing, and Internet radio. It also offers tools for sharing recommendations about places to eat, favorite movies, music and so on.
Both the 360 move and the acquisition of Flickr and parent company Ludicorp Research & Development come as social networking and blogging draw increased interest from rivals. Microsoft in December added a blog product for its MSN Web service, called MSN Spaces. Google, meanwhile, owns Web log service Blogger and social networking site Orkut.
Article link:
http://www.news.com/Yahoo-buys-photo-sharing-site-Flickr/2100-1038_3-5627640.html
Comments on acquisition:
Yahoo did not change the way people use Flickr, as it is still a website stand alone while combining some feathures to Yahoo such as incorporating Flickr’s photos to Yahoo photo search and Yahoo accounts to Flickr’s services. Moreover, the Flickr is still doing well these days, so the acquisition is somewhat succesful as yahoo receives more blog and photo techniques.
2 Comments
October 16, 2007 at 6:56 pm
We can consider this acquisition from below two points.
1. Flickr benefited from this acquisition.
(1) Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in March 2005, when Flickr was just on the border of becoming cash flow breakeven. According to Alexa, Flickr’s traffic is up >10X since the acquisition, so the company was able to extend its reach outside of its initial core user community.
(2) Flickr got $40 million.
2. Yahoo benefited from this acquisition.
(1) Flickr was acquired into the Yahoo search group, thus indicating Yahoo’s intention to integrate Flickr photos into the general image search engine. It’s interesting that the acquisition was not initiated by the Yahoo Photos group, thus revenue, revenue growth, and profit were not the main motivations for the acquisition.
(2) Flickr had developed a robust tagging platform that could be applied to other Yahoo products.
(3) Yahoo was interested in acquiring the people behind Flickr and absorbing their thinking and DNA into the company.
(4) The least important factor in the acquisition was the user community that Yahoo acquired. While Flickr’s growth and buzz were important in validating the technologies that Flickr pioneered, the sheer number of Flickr users was not an important factor in the acquisition. Thus, at its heart, the Flickr acquisition should be thought of as a technology and people acquisition.
October 23, 2007 at 10:07 am
We have not seen any real major use of the FLICKER acquisition towards Yahoo. Except for the help in image searching, We think that this acquisition was not the best purchase that Yahoo has made.
In our opinion its not one of the acquisitions that had a great impact on the internet community. Probably one of the benefits could be to draw traffic from FLICKER, Yahoo would acquire FLICKER’s users and thus increase their traffic or it could be part of an strategy to reinforce their core competences and inject new ideas to Yahoo as Team 6 considered on their Post (Yahoo acquires e-mail software maker Zimbra).
Maybe its a working progress and they have other plans for FLICKER that we have not seen so far.