Pure Play Business: Flickr.com

The pure play business that I decided to look is the popular photo sharing website Flickr.com. With over 3 billion images contributed by users, Flickr is popular for personal photo archiving as well as for finding images for blogs, etc. Photos are tagged with relevant words so they are easily searchable and thousands are uploaded every minute.

Flickr uses the creative commons licensing that we learned about earlier in the course, which allows for a broad range of options as far as sharing original photography goes. The site offers both public and private photo album options.

Here is a screen shot of my father's Flickr Photo Stream. He has almost 3,000 of his photos uploaded, and they are only sports shots of my brother and younger cousins!

The first business model that Flickr uses to generate revenue is the subscription model. Although there is the option of a free account, in order to be able to upload unlimited photos and take advantage of all of the features the site offers, users must pay a yearly fee to subscribe. There are different levels of accounts, but the most common are around $25 per year. By subscribing to the site, users fill out information which gives Flickr a huge database of people for marketing purposes.

The site also uses the community model by allowing users to upload, share, and tag their photos. Many users write small captions explaining their photos and can link them to a Flickr map. The map function allows users to share photos taken in similar places around the world with each other. The site connects people from different backgrounds and locations through common interests within their photos and albums. There is also the option of FlickrMail for users to send messages to one another on the site. Each person can also create a profile to accompany their photo streams.

For an example of using Flickr as a community tool, the following screen shot is one of the many pictures of my brother uploaded to my father's Flickr site. He also posts pictures from almost every game of the season. The players can then go to the site and download the pictures of themselves.

Flickr also is somewhat of an affiliate model and merchant model. By offering users to create and purchase products such as photo books, greeting cards, calendars, etc, with their photos, they are gaining revenue as a merchant. They also partner with other photo sites, such as Blub, MOO, and QOOP, to allow for the creation of these products. Because this most likely means that they are taking part in a revenue sharing process with these companies, they are acting as an affiliate model.

In order to measure performance, Flickr could first look to the number of subscriptions they are receiving. They can also measure how many people sign up for the higher levels of subscriptions after trying the free account. Growth in subscription base and number of photos uploaded would indicate how they are doing. Basic traffic measurements to the site are a good indicator of performance as well.

Sales numbers for the products offered also can be measured. These would reflect Flickr and the affiliate sites as well.

Overall, Flickr is a great community based web site that is completely pure play. It continues to grow in popularity and is becoming a household name. They offer a variety of products and services for their subscribers and seem to be doing very well as one of the top photo sharing websites available.