Mindblowing Stats to Blow Your Mind

I am thoroughly biased; I love Flickr - so let me start with some numbers/facts to set the scene in a somewhat objective fashion.

1. Flickr was publicly launched in 2004, and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.
2. Flickr is now home to over 4 billion (yes billion) photos taken by a community of 45 million registered users, experienced by 80 million unique visitors per month.
3. Flickr spend practically no money on marketing; what little is spent goes on to support Flickr meetups with schwag (stickers, buttons, t-shirts, pro accounts).
4. Flickr has a healthy revenue model (though they wouldn’t say how healthy) built on subscriptions, advertising, photo licensing and e-commerce (printing).
5. Flickr is a team of just 40 people - plus about the same number again who work in Yahoo! data centres where Flickr is deployed.

So, in a cobbling-together-of-factoids sort of way - Flickr is a nimble and successful company.

Scaling Flickr

In our couple of hours with the Tara Kirchner and Heather Champ (who has since left Flickr) they kindly answered any and all questions we could throw at them. It was a real pleasure.

Firstly; we wanted to know how Flickr has grown (seemingly smoothly) from launch to its current size; you may have noticed that the growth of other services hasn’t been so smooth.

Tara and Heather cited the work of former Flickr architect Cal Henderson who laid down a really solid structure on which the service has been built on over time, and the hard graft of the developers at Flickr in the intervening years (the introduction of video has been the biggest technical hurdle along the way). Flickr focus on making small, incremental changes to their platform and where larger changes to the user experience are needed, these changes are researched and designed carefully, before being implemented.

So, that was a quick conversation - technically speaking, Flickr has scaled pretty well; thank you very much.

Going Global Without Going to Jail

The real challenges, explained Tara and Heather, are legal and cultural - not technical.

Flickr is home to all sorts of weird and wonderful content. Because Flickr is offered through Yahoo! portals, integrated with other services, and offered in many languages - it can’t operate as a site that exists exclusively under US law.

For example; in the US Flickr’s service is somewhat protected by the concept of Safe Harbour - whereby they can’t be held completely responsible for the aforementioned weird and wonderful content. In India, where Flickr has recently launched - the concept of Safe Harbour doesn’t exist.

When Flickr makes a decision to launch in another country or language it needs to make sure it is compliant with local laws. This is tricky and expensive [=lawyers].

Nurturing a Community of Communities

Now, let’s say you were to put 45 million people in a room; and it’d need to be a big room, you’re likely to find quite a bit of diversity, and given that everybody is in the same room - people will probably mix with people they ordinarily wouldn’t spend time with. After a while in the room, somebody will say something - and somebody else will be offended. Somebody will think something is hilarious, while others won’t get the joke. Many (most) online services do a terrible job keeping a diverse, active community from eachother’s throats - and so devolve into self-selecting ghettos, or they die completely. We wanted to know how Flickr has avoided this fate.

Well, it’s complicated according to Heather Champ; but it’s predicated on a few core principles built into the DNA of Flickr.

Flickr recognise that its users represent a community of communities with different preferences and interests. Keeping everybody happy isn’t an option, so treating everybody the same is the next best thing. All users, without exception, are subject to a set of fair and legible community guidelines. Flickr avoid nurturing specific groups or promoting individuals; feeding in one place inevitably annoys other people. Flickr is designed to be a non-competitive space, and in as much as is possible - photos that are given a high priority on the site are selected algorithmically.

Early in the development of the service the team decided to give all users the tools they needed to move away from content/people they found objectionable. This stood in contrast to the conventional approach where order was enforced through a hierarchy of users; a type of class system. They also offered users the tools to reflect real-world relationships on Flickr helping to encourage non-weird behaviour.

Summing Up

So, I have lots more that I could write; suffice to say that in a couple of hours with the folks at Flickr we got a great deal of insight. Flickr focus on the things that are important; implementing a great user experience, maintaining a strong sense of identity and purpose and fostering a healthy, positive attitude towards users.

Flickr is made of good people.