How Much is Flickr Worth to Yahoo? Not Very Much. When an internal announcement leaked out of Yahoo last month that it was "sunsetting" popular social bookmarking service Delicious, that service's users flew into a panic.
Yahoo quickly backtracked on the plans and the service remains up and running, if minimally supported. Would Flickr survive the hemorrhaging at its parent company Yahoo? That was the next logical question. Today Flickr power user Thomas Hawk did a little investigation of how many $25/year paid Pro accounts and thus how much annual revenue he estimates Flickr contributes to Yahoo. Hawk's methodology seems reasonable, if generous, and led to the conclusion that Flickr probably brings in around $50 million in annual revenue. Hawk's methodology involved looking at Flickr's last stated number of users from a year ago (40m) and decreasing that number by the 18% that the site's publicly visible web traffic has since declined by.
Put all the numbers together and you get about $50 million in annual revenue. Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them. It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours.
It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper. Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them. The entire time I was reading the back and forth of this fiasco, I had one thought on my mind: I need to get my pictures out of Flickr, pronto. Sure, Delicious has been largely stagnant over the past few years (which, of course, is Yahoo’s fault), but it has long been one of the mainstays of the so-called “Web 2.0″ movement.
Mathew Ingram argues that the moves makes sense from a business perspective. Yahoo’s Internal Three Year Plan: 1 Billion Users And $10 Billion In Revenue. Yahoo unveiled a bevy of new product features today at a press event, and Yahoo product chief Blake Irving told the crowd “You’re going to see things over the next few years that will feel a little bit different.”
He declined, however, to tell the audience what the specific internal goals were, or how Yahoo would define success or failure. “Irving said there are internal goals that the company will use to measure its success, but he declined to share them with reporters,” says VentureBeat. Those goals, we’ve heard from a source close to Yahoo: an increase in the number of unique visitors to Yahoo properties from today’s 622 million to a cool 1 billion. And an increase in overall Yahoo revenue from last year’s $6.5 billion to a whopping $10 billion. Doable? The revenue target is even less likely. 2008 revenue was $7.2 billion, dipping down to $6.5 billion last year. 2010 looks flat v. 2009 so far.
So this is a bit of a stretch goal. Update: Here’s Yahoo’s old 3 year plan from 2007.