
The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help - DeusExMachina
https://blog.flickr.net/en/2019/12/19/the-worlds-most-beloved-money-losing-business-needs-your-help/
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molecule
Discussion of this topic yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841813)

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scjody
Smugmug haven't exactly been kind to the Flickr community - they walked back
the "free forever" promises made by Marissa Meyer and deleted a lot of photos
belonging to anyone who didn't subscribe to a pro plan after the acquisition.
I'm not sure how they expect the community to have much goodwill towards them
after that move.

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smacktoward
This was my question as well.

SmugMug presumably did their due diligence before making the acquisition, they
should have had a decent idea of what it would cost them to operate Flickr
even with the old unlimited-storage model. So I was surprised after they made
the acquisition to see them abandon that model and delete tons of images users
had uploaded to the service in good faith -- it seemed like the cost of
hosting those images was something they should have factored into their
planning. But if that's what it takes for them to keep the service up and
running, I figured, maybe it's an acceptable sacrifice.

Now they come back a year later and say, whoops, we can't make the math work
on this thing _even after_ deleting all those photos. Which makes me wonder if
the math _ever_ really worked -- if they ever had a realistic plan for
operating this service at all -- or if they just saw it was up for sale cheap
one day, and bought it without really working out the business end of the
equation. Statements like "[w]e didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a
cash cow" make me suspect it was the latter.

There's also a weird dissonance in this appeal that gives me pause. If you're
writing a message about how you're struggling to break even, you probably
shouldn't trumpet how you've moved the whole system onto AWS, a notoriously
expensive hosting option for things like static images. And statements like
"Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy
and sell your data" come across as vaguely threatening: "nice community you've
got here, it'd be shame if we had to monetize it."

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opportune
Yeah, I’m guessing moving to AWS is probably destroying their opex due to the
egress fees. Not something I would recommend to anybody who serves heavy
content potentially hundreds/thousands of times for each object.

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ckdarby
Can leave everything on AWS but end up building out the CDN in some unmetered
datacenters.

95th billing makes this kind of stuff cheap :)

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altmind
>> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

This is not a way to go for a financially troubled company.

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ignoramous
> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the
> industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the
> way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more
> quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues
> to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built
> once again.

SmugMug did it primarily to improve stability and performance. They point out
that Flickr hosts tens of billions of photos with 100M registered users and
hundreds of thousands of paying customers across the globe. I see the need to
use AWS (or any cloud provider for that matter) as a necessity to run a paid
web service cost effectively at this scale.

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ivoras
It's a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem, but not really. They still needed
a solid business plan how to earn money from Flickr _before_ moving to AWS (or
any other expensive global cloud) - this kind of looks like they've thought of
asking for money AFTER the move.

Hope the 30% increase in performance was worth it...

~~~
ignoramous
> They still needed a solid business plan how to earn money from Flickr...

SmugMug, by their own admission, bought Flickr to help keep it alive.
Currently, they're not even looking to make money but reduce the operating
costs. I'm sure they didn't take the decision to move to AWS lightly, at all.

> ...this kind of looks like they've thought of asking for money AFTER the
> move.

May be you're right that it might have been a mistake, but the fact that
SmugMug are a heavy AWS user means it might have made a lot of sense to
leverage not only the engineering and operational expertise but also the
heavily discounted rates they must have negotiated with AWS?

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toomuchtodo
Bandwidth and storage is likely still killing them. Should've put it in
Backblaze B2 and paid Cloudflare for CDN.

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qes
Would probably cut their image hosting costs like 70%, maybe more even.

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stevenicr
sounds like "Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their
visitors" needs to change.

Certainly you could make it in-obstrusive - just have a non-moving, small one
in the header and a a larger in the footer.

Don't have any ads next to the photo.

Kicking the 'adult content' off the platform was the first step in that. This
'we tried to beg for money' letter is a good second step.

Hopefully your AWS infrastructure serves the upcoming ads faster as well.

I was never aware that speed was an issue with flickr. When a place has
original content that is not available elsewhere, there is no competition for
speed, imho, ymmv.

I can't buy a pro account, my content which was public on flickr for years,
became against the TOS when smug bought it.

There were several marginalized community groups there that never transitioned
as a whole either.

Sad, it could of become the social network better than fbook.

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amelius
From the title I thought this was about Wikipedia.

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Just1689
Me too. It reminded me of the time I discovered how much Wikimedia spends on
salaries [1]. At the time I was sure it would lead to a collapse in donations.

[1]
[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries)

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ethagknight
Those salaries are downright modest for something as significant as Wikipedia.
I was expecting to see multi-million dollar payouts to execs

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rustybolt
In countries in Europe, salaries typically show less variance (in the
Netherlands, 1.7k gross is minimum wage. Seniors usually make about 5-6k a
month in jobs that are not super high-profile. After tax, figures are _much_
closer).

The executives earn about 10 times what I make as a compiler engineer in a
developed country. I wouldn't exactly call it modest, but it's not totally
outrageous, I guess.

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kwhitefoot
The problem for me is that if I am just using it to archive or back up my
photos then they are asking for more money per year than it would cost me to
simply buy more local disk space and make a local backup. Most of the photos I
have (had) there are private so they incur essentially zero bandwidth charges.

It seems to me that such a system should benefit from economies of scale so
that a year's subscription should at least be cheaper than buying local
storage.

So it's back to Google Photos for unlimited storage of reduced resolution
copies and 15 GB of general storage (enough for over twenty thousand full
resolution pictures from my Moto G5+).

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amatecha
I've already been a Pro subscriber since 2010. Not sure what else I can do to
support them, but I really don't want Flickr to disappear. It was odd they
raised the price. Why don't they lower it, increasing the number of Pro users?
Or does it not work that way? Somehow I feel like switching to AWS will only
increase the costs to them, despite any user-facing improvement.

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reiichiroh
I don’t know how the low promo price helps instead of harm them?

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wenc
Volume.

Let's say their current revenue is R. The 25% promo reduces their revenue to
0.75R, but say they get y% more subscribers. Calculations show that if they
can get an increase of more than y > 33.33% in subscriptions, then their promo
works.

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penetrator
just raise pro price

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amatecha
In fact, they already did. It used to be $24.95/year and was changed to
$49.95/year in 2013 [https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/20/yahoo-drops-flickr-pro-
to-...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/20/yahoo-drops-flickr-pro-to-compete-
with-facebook-still-offers-two-paid-tiers-for-ad-haters-and-power-users/)

