Lesson for Flickr: don’t mess with your paying users

Frederic    video, web 2.0, youtube    

I thought that Flickr adding video wasn’t a great idea – there is a 90 second maximum and you need a pro account ($25 a year) to even upload videos.

Flickr’s users, however are the ones that really didn’t like this new service, especially that Flickr put their money towards developing a video service. Wired calls it a mutiny and The Register a revolt.

What got the Flickr community going apparently was that they were never asked if they wanted video.

I think this is an interesting case study. Any user who is invested in using a service feels a certain sense of ownership over that service – but paid users take this to a completely different level. Paying $25 a year (or $5 a year for that matter) changes the psychology of how users regard a service drastically.  Flickr’s mistake was not to take this into account. At least they could have engaged their most loyal users in a dialogue over this.

I agree that video and flickr don’t seem to match very well – still photography and video are very different beasts. But then I would also have to give kudos to Yahoo! for trying to move Flickr forward. Too often, large companies let acquired products lingering in the darkness of a maintenance mode, but without adding new features (yes, I’m looking at you, Google!).

Usually I would say those users need to get over themselves and stop being so elitist about their photography and embrace the future – but in this case, I understand why these flickr users are so irate.

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