Flickr seems to have won the day…

Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Photos — for years, the No. 1 or No. 2 most-visited photo site on the Web. Its users will be directed to move their pictures to Yahoo’s hot upstart, Flickr.

Flickr, acquired by Yahoo in March 2005, has steadily gained traction. Visitors rose 22% between April 2006 and April 2007, according to measurement service Hitwise. At the same time, Yahoo Photos lost 60% of its audience.

In its heyday, Yahoo Photos was such a go-to place for photo-sharing that more than 2 billion images are stored on its servers, to nearly 500 million for Flickr.

Yahoo Photos will be shut down by the fall. Users will be directed over a three-month period to transfer their images to Flickr or other photo sites such as Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery or Photobucket. Yahoo says it will make the transition easy, with a one-click transfer process.

Now comes the interesting part on many different levels.

Interesting part #1: Much of what’s on Yahoo Photos is crap whereas Flickr users tend to be hobbyist photographers (mostly).

Interesting part #2: People who want a social component of some kind to go along with their photo posting gravitate toward Flickr while people who just want to dump their pictures somewhere tend to gravitate to Yahoo Photos. Two very different strategies with audiences that don’t necessarily intersect.

Interesting part #3: Yahoo Photos appealed to people who wanted a digital shoebox with albums, etc. Flickr is a much less structured environment and it’s gonna piss a lot of people off. Chances are most of the people who are religious Yahoo Photo users will be looking for a similar service (Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, or Webshots) because Flickr won’t fill their needs.

Interesting part #4: Yahoo Photos has a lot more options for gifts and prints than Flickr.

Lots of stuff to ponder as Yahoo executes Yahoo Photos right before the much hyped (and well-received) upgrade they were going to do… In the end, I think it’s going to be a really bad move for Yahoo and might steer even more people away from its services.

via /.

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