An increasingly competitive marketplace has led Yahoo-owned
Flickr Marketplace to bow out of the stock photography market.
After Getty Images
terminated its agreement with Flickr in March 2014 that had enabled Getty to add almost 900,000 images from Flickr photographers to the Getty Images collection, Flickr decided it would set up its own Flickr Marketplace to market the images from its photographer community.
Fast forward to today. Getty has more than
1.8 million Flickr images on gettyimages.com and Flickr has decided to call it quits.
One Flickr photographers says, “No one is in charge at Flickr any more. It's a headless, feckless chicken. The current supposed head of Flickr (in name only) is Jeffrey Bonforte, who is also the product leader for Yahoo Mail. Flickr is now an after thought at Yahoo. The innovators at Flickr are long gone and now working for other Internet companies in the valley. Meanwhile the producers and former group leaders, the shakers, at Flickr are leaving in droves. Making matters worse is the fact that Verizon's acquisition leaves a lot of people wondering ‘what's next’ and since the purchase won't be approved for some time, Flickr is left dangling even more. Flickr is a patient badly in need of a heart transplant, and sadly, there are no donors.”
Flickr announced it will discontinue the service, via an email sent to its users. The service assures its members that all royalties will be paid prior to closure. The email mentions that the decision to close the service resulted from “consistent feedback”, that the service was below standards set by its competitors
500px and
EyeEm, who are locked in a battle to be the leader in the space.
Though the email definitively states that the service will be shut down, the vague wording in the email insinuates there might be a spinoff company. “There is more work to be done” suggests that the owner of Flickr (Yahoo) may not be finished with the space for now, deciding to close down Flickr Marketplace and open another stock photography branch.