Flickr vs. Yahoo Photos: Yahoo Has Chosen
Posted by Sebastien on the 2007/05/04 at 10:41
in Branding, Flickr, Google, Google Video, Social Media, Vancouver, Yahoo!, YouTube -
According to TechCrunch, Yahoo will announce today that they’re shutting down Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr.
What it means: this makes complete sense. The Flickr brand is much stronger and has much more soul than the Yahoo Photos brand. I’m going out on a limb but I’d like to suggest social media and applications are able to build stronger brands because of higher user involvement. I think large organizations are starting to realize that they can have a portfolio of unrelated brands online and it still makes sense from a business point of view. I expect Google will eventually phase out Google Videos in favor of YouTube who has a much stronger brand in the video vertical. Another noteworthy point: after acquiring Flickr, Yahoo moved the whole team to San Francisco (from Vancouver, Canada) but they’ve maintained a separate office for them in order to keep the entrepreneurial spirit (and possibly retain key employees).