Two of the oldest and biggest photography-oriented internet companies are now one. Last week, SmugMug acquired Flickr from Verizon’s Oath after months of discussions and negotiations. As a small, privately held company, SmugMug was a bit of a surprise as rescuer of the venerable Flickr, which has foundered in the era of Facebook and Instagram. SmugMug’s CEO, Don MacAskill, says he knows there were other bidders, and expects most had deeper pockets. (Terms of the sale were not disclosed.) However, he believes SmugMug offered the best fit and continuity for Flickr users. The two services will stay separate indefinitely; SmugMug is adding existing Flickr employees to its staff, including the two executives who ran the brand for Yahoo.
SmugMug and Flickr aren’t precisely yin and yang in the audiences they serve and features they offer. But they do represent two distinct approaches to photo sharing and community interaction. SmugMug, founded in 2002, has charged a subscription fee from the first day, and focuses on beautiful presentation of photos and on services for semi-pro and professional photographers rather than social networking. It’s never raised venture-capital funding, and several family members are in key positions.
Flickr was founded in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo a year later; its founders, Caterina Fake (an investor and founder of multiple companies) and Stewart Butterfield (who went on to cofound Slack), departed three years after that. Their service initially flourished in part because it fostered deep ties among its users through discussion boards and photo comments. Despite the many changes Flickr has gone through over the past 14 years, those qualities abide.
MacAskill says he knows there will be challenges in meshing these two distinct cultures, but adds that he did the deal because of Flickr’s unique strengths. “Both companies really stand for photography and for photographers,” he says. SmugMug had been wrestling for years with the question of how to add a free tier in a way that would complement its paid services and encourage more participation; Flickr, which offers a terabyte of photo storage for free, may be part of the solution.
Flickr, by contrast, says on its hiring page that it has over 90 million monthly users, although there’s no detail about how many pay for the Flickr Pro upgrade, which costs $50 a year. MacAskill didn’t disclose that number, either; he says there were a “number of surprises” involving how many people have paid Flickr accounts and the average storage consumed by users, but doesn’t elaborate. He also notes that after the acquisition announcement, he found that many SmugMug customers also have free or paid Flickr accounts. “We’ll build bridges,” he says, but stresses that he can’t imagine merging the two offerings or requiring anyone to move from one service to another.
