Shares of Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) were trading 2.4% lower this afternoon as the company, while the company wants to position its new Flickr photo sharing platform as a professional tool while re-introducing the Flickr Pro subscription.
When Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013 for US$1.1 billion, the company introduced a new version of Flickr, a benchmark for amateur photographers, who, however, have gradually been turning to Facebook.
Yahoo updated Flickr, unveiling a new user interface, giving users a full terabyte of free storage. Meanwhile, the Sunnyvale, California based firm withdrew subscriptions for Flickr Pro, then costing US$24.95 dollars, even as subscribers could keep their subscription and their unlimited storage.
Now, Yahoo has updated and re-introduced the paid subscription product with a new fee of US$49.99 per year or 5.99 dollars per month, still capping capacity to one terabyte. The service will be competing against Google’s Photos, which offers unlimited free storage. Amazon also offers unlimited quota on its servers for subscribers to the Premium.
In its defense, Rajiv Vaidyanathan, Flickr’s developer, said that only a hundred members have reached a terabyte of storage and it is quite enough for some 113 million users of the service. Moreover, unlike Google Photos which limits resolution to 16 MP and 1080p for videos, Flickr focuses on quality in order to meet the needs of professional photographers who rather than using a smartphone rely on a real camera for their work., while benefiting from the lack of advertising.
Customers already owning a Pro account retain unlimited storage space and only pay US$24.95 dollars for the next two years before being transferred to the new fee.
Previously, Yahoo had also increased subscription to Yahoo! Mail Plus simply proposing to remove advertising. Renamed Ad-free Yahoo! Mail, it rose from 19.99 dollars to 49.99 dollars while the formerly unlimited storage is now capped at 1TB for all users.