Laurent Kretz

Just found an interesting study on Flickr usage: The Strength of Weak Cooperation: a case study on Flickr. Le Figaro, a french magazine, has a review of the study (in french).

Careful with the numbers: the study dates from the summer of 2006 !

Flickr, a photo-sharing tool, was acquired in March 2005 by Yahoo! for $35M in cash. I think this might be the best investment ever for Yahoo!: cheap, and worth every penny of it !

Highlights

Ok, let’s cut to the chase - here are the highlights of the study:

• 20% of the users uploaded 82% of the pictures,
• 62% of the users didn’t upload pictures,
• 39% of the accounts are inactive,
• 3.7% of the users have pro-accounts and own 59.5% of the pictures,
• 3.7% pro-accounts out of 4.8M users means $4.5M in membership revenues,
• 3% use the service entirely (uploading, communicating, commenting, geotagging, organizing, “favoriting”, …).

Conclusion ? 

The first conclusion of the review is that there is no majority in the usage of Flickr functionalities (uploading, commenting, …). The only statement that can be done about the usage of the site is that 100% of Flickr users watch pictures.

I am not surprised by the 20/80 rule: 20% of the users own 80% of the pictures. Remember, these are users, not visitors. I remember stats from YouTube: for 1,000 visitors, there is 10 active commenters, and 1 active uploader (I can’t find the source anymore, any help ?).

The real surprising number is the 3%: only 3% of the users use ALL the functionalities.

Let’s talk business

Flickr is a perfect example of the Freemium business model: the service is free with limits (in functionality, in storage, …). Everyone is more or less doing the same thing now (think online storage, video storage, online applications, …).

Fred Wilson has been advocating for the model for years, and wrote again about it recently. Also read Chris Anderson’s post in this month Wired.

This is a very straightforward way to have the “short tail” enable the Long tail to benefit of a service. The 3.7% hardcore users (in Flickr’s case according to this study) bring membership revenues of $4.5M to Flickr, enable Flickr to provide the service for free (but limited) to 94.3% of its users.

Everyone benefits of it: pro accounts have a wonderful service, free users use it up to their needs, and the whole site receives billions of pictures.

Now the question of the day: could this work for Twitter ?

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