Yahoo! to Add Video to Flickr

March 19, 2008

Yahoo is taking bold new steps to cut into Google’s 22% video streaming market share with the announcement of the addition of video content to Flickr, Yahoo’s extremely popular photo sharing service. Flickr’s video service, expected to release in beta in April, will not replace Yahoo Video which ranks 3rd in video streaming with 4.6% of the streaming market share (Myspace is 2nd with 6% of market share). “The audience for Flickr is different”, says Kakul Srivastava, Director of Product Management at Flickr.
Flickr, which boasts over 23 million contributors, has been widely adopted by the Web 2.0 crowd. Instead of simply adding video to Flickr, Yahoo has opted to stay loyal to its users and community. Showing Yahoo’s ability to keep their fingers on the pulse of their users, Yahoo has recognized that the Flickr community would not take kindly to a “Youtube Duplication”. Expect something new from Yahoo!

Category: web 2.0

George

*rubs hands together in video-y anticipation* Man, now I really hope MSFT doesn't buy Yahoo.

markus

I see I'm not the only one salivating over this.

Yahoo, for the most part, has been great at knowing what their users want and giving it to them. If the Microhoo does happen hopefully more of Yahoo would rub off on Microsoft than the other way around. If that were to happen then I'm OK with acquisition. I think the competition will be good for the search space.

Gureala

Whoa...I'm definitely looking forward to seeing this!

Speaking of Yahoo and Flickr, I recently did an image search on Yahoo and was surprised to find photos from personal flickr accounts included in the results. Naturally I'd be the last person to catch this, since I spend more time on Google these days, but when did Yahoo make this sudden change???

urbantech

Actually even prior to Yahoo buying Flickr you could see personal images in the results pages for Yahoo and Google under the images search feature. This is actually why Yahoo more then likely had the insight to buy Flickr. They probably saw all the traffic they (Flickr) were getting from people search for images on the Yahoo site, and fugure it was smart to buy this company. I think it was one of the best Acquisitions besides WebJay they did. Unfortunanetly they couldnt monitize on webjay fast enough before people like LastFM swooped into the space and most people havent even heard of WebJay!!