Flicker (No, Not That One) Bares Its Stats In An Attempt To Get Rich

June 26, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News

Flickr, Yahoo’s photo property, is one of the largest picture sharing services in the world. However, whether you were to ask a group of random public how you spell its domain, a high percentage would likely tell you F-L-I-C-K-E-R. That’s not surprising, but it’s undoubtedly longstanding a headache for Yahoo. And now the folks who own Flicker.com are looking to capitalize on it.

If you visit the site, you’ll see that it now exposes its traffic stats in the lower right-hand corner. It’s a blatant attempt to form money, at the very least from advertisers willing to throw hyperlinks on the page. Or presumably to get someone to buy the domain.

Here are the stats they publish:

Flicker by the numbers:

Unique Visits:
3.6MM /yr

Source:
Direct Navigation (95.74%)

Outbound Clicks:
400K /yr

CPC Keyword Values:
(Photography equipment)
$2.50 -$3.00 /click

Daily Value to Advertisers:
$2700.00 - $3300.00

(Data is approximate, tracking by Google Analytics)

Below that is a link to contact them.

You’ll notice that by 95% of the traffic comes from direct navigation. That’s considering whether you Google “Flicker,” you’ll find flickr.com first, and flicker.com nowhere to be found on the first page of results. And that means that millions of folks each year are typing in “flicker.com” likely expecting flickr.com. Certainly, that’s worth something, and Flicker knows it.

But the humans

who own flicker.com probably shouldn’t hold their breath for Yahoo to buy the domain anytime soon. After all, they’re busy selling off their own killer domain names on the cheap to manufacture money.

And so the site is resorting to rather shady tactics. While its main page claims that it’s down for maintenance, there’s a Twitter button right next to that to tweet out that it’s down for maintenance. You might think that most sites wouldn’t want folks to know that they’re site is down, but not Flicker. That’s considering they clearly want humans to advertise on their new “down” website.

And it’s working, look at how many folks are actually tweeting that rubbish out. You can be certain that a lot of them think Yahoo’s Flickr is down, and they’re just trying to let others know. Flicker has its own Twitter account that highlights all these tweets.

On the site below its maintenance note, you’ll find a bunch of urls to camera equipment (the same group Flicker directly appeals to with its ‘CPC Keyword Value’ stats). And just to keep things even more shady, all of these urls are bit.ly shortened hyperlinks.

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