| WHY did they drop it not mentioned AT&T isn't in the business of driving customers away. So, why did they drop the Flickr Pro svc down to regular Flickr accounts as a free perk?
The news item doesn't say. But I suspect that Yahoo, in deep trouble financially, wanted a lot more money from AT&T to provide Flickr Pro services for free to their customers. And if the amount requested by Yahoo was large enough, AT&T would have had to increase prices for their internet users. Hence, the downgrade to regular Flickr accounts.
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1 edit | But I suspect that Yahoo, in deep trouble financially, wanted a lot more money from AT&T to provide Flickr Pro services for free to their customers. I suspect you're right. But were any demands made unreasonable? I fired an e-mail to Yahoo but haven't heard back... |
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| reply to fAcEtIOUs
said by fAcEtIOUs:But I suspect that Yahoo, in deep trouble financially, wanted a lot more money from AT&T to provide Flickr Pro services for free to their customers. And if the amount requested by Yahoo was large enough, AT&T would have had to increase prices for their internet users. Hence, the downgrade to regular Flickr accounts. Yahoo! should have been able to predict if AT&T was unwilling to pay a new higher fee for free services and would have been further ahead to raise it for everyone (not just ISPs who buy in BULK, but unwilling to pay full price per user).
No, considering AT&T have been on the front lines of claiming a "bandwidth apocalypse", adding caps, pay-per-byte, outrageous overage charges, and acting as if 99% of their customers were already overusing their accounts. I would be more willing to suspect AT&T of the drop. |
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| reply to fAcEtIOUs
Not quite. Way back in the day (when the AT&T-Yahoo! cobrand started), AT&T was looking for a way to deliver a portal experience (like AOL) without having to build it themselves. AT&t negotiated a deal where they would pay Yahoo! per-subscriber for a premium experience.
Fast forward to late 2007/early 2008. AT&T no longer felt that the portal experience was as important and wanted to renegotiate the deal. The new deal (announced here on DSLR news -- »Yahoo, AT&T Renew Ties) reduced AT&T's fixed cost-per-customer and increased the advertising revshare given to AT&T on AT&T-Yahoo! page views. As part of this deal, the number of premium services (Flickr Pro being one of them) negotiated by AT&T were reduced.
The long and short of it is that AT&T wanted to pay less per-subscriber and make more on advertising revshare at the expense of the customer experience.
Hopefully this helps... |
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| It also helps that AT&T now has a full portal solution developed 100% in house )which includes a photo album solution with, as far as I can tell, unlimited storage). Granted, you have to be an account that isn't on AT&T Yahoo! to use it...
Benefits to AT&T: they get 100% of the advertising revenue, the product is developed 100% in house to keep costs down, and people are already using it.
When did AT&T come up with this solution? They didn't. They acquired it in the merger with BellSouth. The replaced the former AT&T WorldNet portal with it earlier this year, and eventually migrated legacy AT&T customers (that didn't migrate to AT&T Yahoo!) to it.
In fact, the new "AT&T Yahoo!" page actually has alot of services provided 100% by AT&T (take Travel for instance). |
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| The big draw to Flickr is the social sharing aspect of the site. There are a million photo sharing sites out there, but Flickr is the most popular one for sharing photos publicly with friends and groups. That's a value-add that AT&T is unlikely (and shouldn't be) developing in-house. |
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| reply to fAcEtIOUs
Honestly...how many people do you think even knew about the Flickr subsidy? I've been an AT&T internet user for years and never heard of the discount. AT&T ain't no fool. I'm sure they analyzed their customer base to determine the % of customers that truly utilized the premium Flickr membership offer and determined they could cut it loose without much negative publicity. Besides, AT&T has had as rocky relationship with Yahoo in recent years concerning the co-branding of broadband service. Before the name change from SBC to AT&T, Yahoo used to get a large annual payment from AT&T because Yahoo was responsible for both marketing to and activating new AT&T broadband customers. This service was branded under the SBC Yahoo! Broadband (DSL) moniker or something to that effect. I believe that contract was cancelled outwrite as the "new AT&T" in-sourced that operation so that the Yahoo name didn't dilute the AT&T brand and/or confuse existing/new customers. I could be wrong, but I remember reading an article a year or so ago that stated that the old SBC paid Yahoo roughly 400 million annually for that service and cancelled the contract completely. This was one of the reasons why Microsoft was not so inclined to up the ante on their original offer for Yahoo!. The loss of such a big contract was handwriting on the wall. I suspect that the free Flickr add-on was merely a last minute component to the Yahoo deal that had a slighly longer expiration date than that of the master marketing agreement. It may also have been something that Yahoo added on late in the game as an attempt to increase the stickiness of its original contract with SBC, to no avail. Even if Yahoo had no prior relations with SBC/AT&T, it does make business sense for AT&T to sever ties now. If a net neutrality debate re-ignites during Obama's administration, it is best that all ISP's (AT&T & otherwise) distance themselves as much as they can from content providers of all genres. The argument that content providers are getting away with murder by eating up ISP's internet capacity when the ISP's and content providers are sleeping the same bed won't make much of a case in front of the FCC. |
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