Jim has a good blog post on How Every Flickr Photo went on sale this weekend. Everyone who uses flickr should read it.
There have been numerous cases where flickr photos have been abused. Not surprising given that flickr is one of the biggest photo collections, and it's freely accessible not only via the web but via an API. It's not surprising that it becomes the target of people trying to make a quick buck by bending the rules or ignoring them altogether.
What is less unfortunate though is that it seems that flickr itself doesn't appear interested (at least publicly) in addressing the problem. If they don't, and this becomes a bigger concern among more folks, they might see people delete photos and go to other sites. As with many social networking sites, your success can be short lived if you take a mis-step. As someone put it a few weeks ago at a conference, with a particular view of Facebook, another popular online site, to be successful in this space, you not only have to outperform the competition, you also have to outbehave the competition. Ignoring problems and then asking for forgiveness later is a recipe for failure. The recent departure of both of the founders of flickr from Yahoo, and some of the rumors around them probably don't help on that front. Here's the official Yahoo News story on their departure, and here a bit more background.
Though there's no doubt that flickr will continue on to get pictures from the hordes of 'people with cameras' to use a more PC version of this phrase, because they will less likely care about the usages of their images. In fact they may be flattered to see one of their images being distributed as cell phone wall paper. But it would change the mix of the content on flickr, and a slide towards lower quality of content would eventually make it a less attractive target, and it could quietly fade into history.
As it comes to why Yahoo has flickr as a way to build social content to drive traffic, it's not surprising that Google does it better than Yahoo. Google uses the various image assets they have as part of their network to improve search results, and in turn drive traffic which they can properly monetize. I have yet to see Yahoo succeed on that front judging from the web traffic I see at various places I monitor this data. Considering that running flickr isn't cheap, and pro subscription fees nowhere near pay for it, having a strategy to monetize it is key to success. Yahoo seems to be struggling on that front all around as has been amply covered in recent news coverage.
I do use flickr, but only for sharing some photos with other flickr users who I met through a flickr related event. And I also routinely delete photos from flickr once they've served their purpose. Seems that this isn't a bad practice given the problems Jim describes.
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