[Leica] Flickr CEO asks for help

[scleroplex]

Dear Flickr Pros,

First, and above all else: thank you. Thank you for being a part of
our community. Thank you for caring about Flickr. Thank you for
supporting Flickr. Thank you for being a Flickr Pro.

Two years ago, Flickr was losing tens of millions of dollars a year.
Our company, SmugMug, stepped in to rescue it from being shut down and
to save tens of billions of your precious photos from being erased.

Why? We’ve spent 17 years lovingly building our company into a
thriving, family-owned and -operated business that cares deeply about
photographers. SmugMug has always been the place for photographers to
showcase their photography, and we’ve long admired how Flickr has been
the community where they connect with each other. We couldn’t stand by
and watch Flickr vanish.

So we took a big risk, stepped in, and saved Flickr. Together, we
created the world’s largest photographer-focused community: a place
where photographers can stand out and fit in.

And yet, Flickr—the world’s most-beloved, money-losing business—still
needs your help.

We’ve been hard at work improving Flickr. We hired an excellent, large
staff of Support Heroes who now deliver support with an average
customer satisfaction rating of above 90%. We got rid of Yahoo’s
login. 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.

Our work is never done, but we’ve made tremendous progress.

Flickr still needs your help. It’s still losing money. You, and
hundreds of thousands of loyal Flickr members stepped up and joined
Flickr Pro, for which we are eternally grateful. It’s losing a lot
less money than it was. But it’s not yet making enough.

We need more Flickr Pro members if we want to keep the Flickr dream
alive, and we need your help to share the story of Flickr.

We didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow. Unlike
platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy
and sell your data. We bought it because we love photographers, we
love photography, and we believe Flickr deserves not only to live on
but thrive. We think the world agrees; and we think the Flickr
community does, too. But we cannot continue to operate it at a loss as
we’ve been doing.

Flickr is the world’s largest photographer-focused community. It’s the
world’s best way to find great photography and connect with amazing
photographers. Flickr hosts some of the world’s most iconic, most
priceless photos, freely available to the entire world. This community
is home to more than 100 million accounts and tens of billions of
photos. It serves billions of photos every single day. It’s huge. It’s
a priceless treasure for the whole world. And it costs money to
operate. Lots of money.

As you know, Flickr is the best value in photo sharing anywhere in the
world. Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and
their visitors, advanced stats, unlimited full-quality storage for all
their photos, plus premium features and access to the world’s largest
photographer-focused community.

Please, help us spread the word. Help us make Flickr thrive. Help us
ensure Flickr has a bright future. Every Flickr Pro subscription goes
directly to keeping Flickr alive and creating great new experiences
for photographers like you. We are building lots of great things for
the Flickr community, but we need your help. We can do this together.

We’re launching our end-of-year Pro subscription campaign on Thursday,
December 26, but I want to give you a coupon code to share with
friends, family, or anyone who shares your love of photography and
community so they can enjoy the same 25% discount before the campaign
starts.

We’ve gone to great lengths to optimize Flickr for cost savings
wherever possible, but the increasing cost of operating this enormous
community and continuing to invest in its future will require a small
price increase early in the new year, so this is truly the very best
time to help everyone upgrade to a Pro membership.

If you value Flickr finally being independent, built for photographers
and by photographers, we need your help.

With gratitude,

Don MacAskill
Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek
SmugMug + Flickr