Several years ago Yahoo and SBC (later becoming AT&T) formed a partnership where SBC's DSL service was co-branded with Yahoo. Verizon later signed a similar deal. DSL customers enjoyed many Yahoo services at no extra cost. One of those features was Flickr.
With AT&T and Verizon broadband customers having recently been notified of the expiration of their free flickr service it is up to Yahoo to convince these customers to part with some of their money. Yahoo needs to clearly show these people why they would want to pay for something that they used to get for free. We may see an upswing in earnings for Yahoo as these customers if they can convince them to go from free to pay.
Now before you get too worried about AT&T and Yahoo splitting up you need to understand that their deal was renegotiated in early 2008 and is still in effect. Flickr is the only services that AT&T broadband customers have been told that they are losing. This may even be a test case on either party's behalf to see if they can make more with a revenue share model than they do by burying the cost in the DSL subscription cost.
As to the difference between paid and free there is this breakdown from Yahoo:
- Here's what you'll get with a Pro Account ($24.95/yr):
- Unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo)
- Unlimited video uploads (90 seconds max)
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited photosets
- Archiving of high-resolution original images
- The ability to replace a photo
- Post any of your photos or videos in up to 60 group pools
- Ad-free browsing and sharing
- View count and referrer statistics
- Compare that to what you get with a Free Account:
- 100 MB monthly upload limit (10MB per photo)
- 3 sets
- Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images
- Post any of your photos in up to 10 group pools
- Only smaller (resized) images accessible (though the originals are saved in case you upgrade later)
Clearly any AT&T customer who has used flickr will be weighing the pros and cons of paying an extra couple of dollars a month to continue having the full use of their flickr account. That or they will look for another free option for storing their photographs online.
If I was a betting man I would bet on users paying the fee. $24.95 is not that much money to continue to be a part of the flickr community because when you get right down to it flickr is a social website. Why do I think this way? Probably because both my wife and I will be paying the fee to keep our flickr accounts useful.