SmugMug purchases Flickr

[John Earley]

https://www.smugmug.com/together/

[Tin Can]

What is your opinion?

[John Olsen]

I have a Smugmug website and they've done a good job of maintaining it over the last nine years. They also have actual humans working on their help desk. I use Flickr to post to this forum, so I want that to continue to function well - Smugmug will be a good consolidation.

[Tracy Storer]

Logging in to Flickr recently, I've been prompted to agree to new terms of service from "Oath", which I think is now out of the picture? Curious to see what happens with this, I'm not agreeing to new terms of service till things settle in a bit.

[tgtaylor]

I've been getting the same notifications when signing into my Yahoo mail account but have put off agreeing until things settle down. Suspiciously, the new Oath terms appeared shortly after Zuckerberg appeared before Congress and I suspect it is an attempt to short circuit industry regulations which are coming. No such terms have appeared on my yahoo small business website login - yet.

Yesterday I received a long email from Yahoo saying that eventually you will have to agree with the terms.

Thomas

[faberryman]

Yesterday I received a long email from Yahoo saying that eventually you will have to agree with the terms.
Two buttons: "Agree" and "Exit".

[jp]

Hope they don't intend to get rich selling printing services to their new flickr customers. I still think printing is in decline.

I'm guessing it might be better than a Verizon or Oath type big data advertising conglomerate.

[Tin Can]

What idiot chose 'Oath' as the name of a company.

I immediately distrust it.

And I have no idea what it is.

I'm even scared to Google it!

Soon we won't need Darkrooms as the whole planet will be Dark.

[Graham Patterson]

Flickr was bought by Yahoo (around 2005, I think). It was part of the deal when Verizon bought Yahoo recently. 'Oath' is the name of the Verizon entity operating the items from the Yahoo portfolio. On balance, I'm probably happier that Flickr is leaving the Verizon house, rather than staying.

[Since many people probably said something along the lines of 'Oh ____' to the Yahoo sale, maybe 'Oath' was a tacit recognition of that response 8-)]

[Mark Sawyer]

I just hope it doesn't go the Photobucket route, free for years, then overnight, $400 per year, wiping the images from many threads here and across the internet.

[John Earley]

I could be wrong but I don't think we'll get Photobucket style hostage takers out of this. I do think they will have to monetize Flickr to a larger extent to recoup their investment. That may or may not involve higher fees for participation but I don't think they'll go the crazy with it after the PB response. Or at least I hope so.

[germansaram]

I could be wrong but I don't think we'll get Photobucket style hostage takers out of this. I do think they will have to monetize Flickr to a larger extent to recoup their investment. That may or may not involve higher fees for participation but I don't think they'll go the crazy with it after the PB response. Or at least I hope so.

One might think business people learn from others' mistakes. But in the end, all that matters is money. They can't make business when they are losing money. I hope there will be a customer-friendly result in the end, though.

[lawsonpix]

I don't have a problem with SmugMug buying Flickr. I recently stated posting to 500px, but I am not happy with that. I'm happy with Flickr, and I doubt SmugMug will make any large changes as they know they will alienate their user base.

[edit: corrected a spelling error]

[pjd]

What idiot chose 'Oath' as the name of a company.

I immediately distrust it.

And I have no idea what it is.

I'm even scared to Google it!

Soon we won't need Darkrooms as the whole planet will be Dark.

+1, "Oath" is a shockingly bad name, Orwellian overtones.

[John Earley]

Unlike PhotoBucket, who seemed to follow a "take no prisoners" approach to monetizing their platform, Flickr seems to be using some business savvy ideas to keep and expand theirs. Sensible limits to free postings and for $49.99 per year, get unlimited storage, ad-free browsing, advanced stats and more.