Yahoo! Photos, the flagship photo sharing service of Yahoo! Inc., has decided to close the doors and turn its focus on Yahoo’s 2005 acquisition of the photo sharing website, Flickr.

Yahoo Photos’ users will be given three months to make the transition from the once popular photo hosting site to one of the newly emerging alternatives, as Yahoo Photos plans to shut down by Fall.

In March 2005, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Flickr, which will be Yahoo’s #1 suggested alternative for its members image migration. Among other choices are Photobucket, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly Inc., and Snapfish.

Yahoo’s reasoning to keep both Yahoo! Photos and Flickr services in motion, after the acquisition, was primarily due to the different audiences that each service catered to.

But the Internet is changing, and Yahoo Photos simply doesn’t want to change with it. Of course, with a 60% audience loss in the last year, it’s not exactly quitting while it’s still ahead.

It seems as though this plan was set in motion nearly 2 years ago when Yahoo! acquired Flickr, as updates to the photo hosting site were minimal; Yahoo has simply given up.

Yahoo says it will make the transition an easy one click process; but given the choice between other competing sites, it will surely loose a good deal of its users.

This move comes shortly after a report by Hitwise noting that Photobucket’s share in the photo hosting market is at an outstanding 41%, while Yahoo Photos and Flickr, combined, only account for 10.2% of the market.

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Entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 4:33 am under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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