As a way to break Yahoo! down to smaller pieces, Verizon is making Yahoo! sell its popular photo-sharing community Flickr, to SmugMug.
What this means, Flickr that has more than 90 million users uploading tens of billions of photos, is becoming part of SmugMug service.
While the two has a very different beginning, they managed to gain a strong foothold in the photographic community. But unlike Flickr, SmugMug has never offered a free service.
With the acquisition, SmugMug is allowing Flickr to run on its own brand, with the two staying largely the same. The two continues to "operate as separate entities", but with a "shared goal."
“The future is bright,” said SmugMug on its site, “but we’ll only get there together.”
SmugMug was founded in 2002 by Chris and Don MacAskill, a father and son team. Without the help of outside investors or the help of venture capital, the company facilitates the selling of digital and print media for amateur and professional photographers.
And as for Flickr, it was acquired by Yahoo! back in 2005. Flickr was planned to be part of Yahoo! Photos service, but apparently it was more resilient and better on its own. The service has remained popular with photographers, but as it ages and less improvements were made, it trails behind Facebook and Google in terms of sheer quantity of images stored.
With Flick acquired by SmugMug, "Together,” a press release read, they “represent the world’s most influential community of photographers."
Further reading: Verizon Acquires Yahoo!: The Beginning Of A New Beginning
