[stewartm]

"Second, you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Giving away vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over yours. ...."

So I fork out $50/yr and Flickr will stop flogging my data to advertisers or, will grow a very specific group of users, whos data is more valuable to advertisers than the general free membership .... and Flickr will then flog that to advertisers at a premium?

I would have preferred to see improvements to Flickr before a push to subscriptions. My guess is that for the money I can find much better established services, tho in fairness I have not looked, so may be wrong on that. I guess I am about to find out.

[superkuh]

They chose this model because it is what they were already doing as smugmug (who just bought twitter). Any reasoning is just rationalization.

[jzawodn]

Smugmug bought Flickr, not Twitter.

[superkuh]

Oops. Yeah, obviously that's what I meant. I was working on twitter scraping perl scripts at the time.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

If it's a business model that worked for them with SmugMug then why not? Flickr has been decaying for years, it's about time someone turned it into a viable business again.