Popular online photo-sharing service Flickr has been acquired by SmugMug, a company which already offers a photo storage and sharing services. The announcement was made today by SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill.
MacAskill says SmugMug aims to breathe a new life in Flickr, which was founded in 2004, and was part of Yahoo since 2005. The service, however, couldn’t really keep up with the pace as the world entered the smartphone era due to lack of resources and finances or misplaced priorities of the parent company.
SmugMug CEO says Flickr will be maintained as a standalone product, with all the focus and resources it deserves, although at this point he doesn’t have any clarity on what exactly SumgMug wants to do with Flickr.
It sounds silly for the CEO not to totally know what he’s going to do, but we haven’t built SmugMug on a master plan either. We try to listen to our customers and when enough of them ask for something that’s important to them or to the community, we go and build it
“I don’t know what the future holds. This is a new model for me. We certainly think we need to operate it with an eye to our cash flow and our profitability. We are going to have to take a detailed look at the business and make sure it’s growing and healthy
According to comScore, Flickr currently has over 75 million registered photographers, more than 100 million unique users, and around 13 million unique visitors.
Stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) to hear about all related developments as and when they occur