Flickr isn’t very good at making money, but as the old adage goes, sex sells. So, in an attempt to draw in more paying subscribers, Flickr changed its content guidelines to only allow Flickr Pro users to post “restricted” or “moderate” content, which includes photos of “full-frontal nudity and sexual acts.”
Honestly, it’s not a bad move — it might be more effective than asking subscribers to recruit their friends to pay for Flickr.
When SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service in 2018, CEO Don MacAskill hoped to make the service profitable, calling it “core to the entire fabric of the Internet.” But this wasn’t just hyperbolic CEO-speak — MacAskill had a point. Flickr is a historical archive. For one thing, it showcases actual historical images, but it also chronicles a visual history of the world through the lens of millions of people since 2004. It would be sad if that were all to disappear.
But Flickr is very expensive to run, since it hosts so much data on the internet. For a while, there wasn’t much of a reason to pay for Flickr, since all users had a free terabyte of storage for their photos. But under SmugMug’s management, Flickr instituted a limit on how many photos free users could store, kn …
