what made Flickr Successful?

I read a case study of Flickr how it got success using technology and people? And what made Yahoo acquire Flickr?
Go through it.

Flickr got a lot of loyal users in a very short amount of time with no marketing spend, and that’s something that many web entrepreneurs are interested in understanding.

Key Success Factors

1) Flickr prioritized the development of viral product features.

Flickr might not have had a formal product roadmap, but they did explicitly focus their limited development resources on product features that directly helped to grow their user base. Features that have become synonymous with Web 2.0, like easy blog integration / export and post to Flickr badges on people’s sites were developed early on. As a result of these efforts, nearly 80% of new users found Flickr through the blogs of other Flickr users. Flickr also gave incentives to its power users to actively promote Flickr to friends by offering premium features (e.g. extra storage) in exchange for user referrals.

Emphasis on making a user’s first interaction with Flickr a positive one.

Flickr didn’t make visitors to register just to view their friend’s photo, unlike the major photo sharing sites at the time. This is just one aspect of the many things Flickr did right to convert visitors into Flickr users, such as a simple user interface with no intrusive advertising. But even beyond the product and UI, Flickr emphasized making new users feel welcome just to make people feel part of the community. Flickr put a tremendous amount of effort into community development and support.

Flickr makes discovering and accessing quality photos easy.

When Flickr came on to the scene there were really two kinds of photosharing services out there: those focused on efficiency around creating prints (Shutterfly, Ofoto) and those focused on public sharing of photos (Fotolog, Buzznet, Webshots). Flickr was really competing with that second group. Flickr is how easy it is to find quality photos – the best quality pictures on a certain theme rise to the top.The Flickr team targeted these professional and semi-professional photographers as the core of the initial Flickr community. They worked very hard to nurture the development of this community. Catering to the power users raises the quality of the photos, thereby benefiting the entire community. Flickr, unlike the hobbyist sites (Fotolog or Buzznet), emphasized that Flickr was indeed a for profit business. I think this perception of Flickr as a company gave users, particularly the power users, more confidence in the service.

Launch Strategy

Flickr also benefited from a general market need around photo hosting for use in blogs and social networks – as witnessed by the success of services like PhotoBucket and ImageShack. Flickr was also the beneficiary of a great amount of mainstream PR, even if they did not instigate it themselves. Flickr did not hire a PR firm to generate publicity early on, only hiring a firm to help manage PR requests after the initial buzz created by viral marketing.Exit Analysis

Exit Analysis

Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in March 2005, when Flickr was just on the border of becoming cash flow breakeven.Flickr’s traffic is up >10X since the acquisition, so the company was able to extend its reach outside of its initial core user community. So what was Yahoo’s motivation to acquire Flickr? Flickr was acquired into the Yahoo search group, thus indicating Yahoo’s intention to integrate Flickr photos into the general image search engine.

It’s interesting that the acquisition was not initiated by the Yahoo Photos group, thus revenue, revenue growth, and profit were not the main motivations for the acquisition. Secondly, Flickr had developed a robust tagging platform that could be applied to other Yahoo products. Third, Yahoo was interested in acquiring the people behind Flickr and absorbing their thinking and DNA into the company. The least important factor in the acquisition was the user community that Yahoo acquired. While Flickr’s growth and buzz were important in validating the technologies that Flickr pioneered, the sheer number of Flickr users was not an important factor in the acquisition. Thus, at its heart, the Flickr acquisition should be thought of as a technology and people acquisition.