You are herePicture This: Yahoo Finally Takes Control Of Flicker.com For Flickr
Picture This: Yahoo Finally Takes Control Of Flicker.com For Flickr
As one of the most popular social sites on the planet, Flickr is also undoubtedly one of the most popular misspelled domains. Pronounced “Flicker,” Flickr decided to be all Web 2.0-cutesy with its name back in the day. That’s fine, except when someone else owns the Flicker.com domain. Yahoo, which bought Flickr in 2005, has finally done something about that — obtaining Flicker.com.
As we noted a year ago, Flicker.com put itself on sale in a very visible way. Anyone who visited the page was greeted by a logo and statistics about how much traffic the site receives. So how much traffic was Flicker.com getting? 3.6 million unique visitors a year, according to them. Almost all of those hits were direct (95%) undoubtedly because people would misspell Flickr.com as Flicker.com.
The Domains first reported that the WHOIS record has changed, and we’ve since confirmed with Yahoo that they did take control of the domain. “The FLICKER.COM domain has been transferred to Yahoo!,” a spokesperson told us but declined to say anything further. Earlier today, Domain Name Wire reported that a lawsuit settlement gave Yahoo the domain. Back in 2007, Yahoo supposedly offered the owners of Flicker.com $600,000 for the domain, which they supposedly turned down.
For now, Flicker.com is still pointing to the old landing page, but you can probably expect that to change soon.
Update: Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake (no longer with the service — but working on a new startup, Hunch) left the following comment below to with some of the history behind the name:
We tried to buy the domain from the prior owner who made a beer called Flicker Beer. He wasn’t interested in selling. He then, I believe, sold it to the current/former owner. We liked the name “Flicker” so much we dropped the E. It wasn’t very popular on the team, I had to do a lot of persuasion. Then the dropped “E” thing became something of a cliché…
So there you go, Flicker Beer led to the service dropping the “e” and starting a trend (including, at one point, Twitter).
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I have to say that before today I’d never heard of the Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” But today they awarded it to Daniel Bogan, and he has been added to the list.
We just wrote about the sale of Social.com, which will auctioned off this week at DOMAINfest Barcelona with an opening bid of a whopping $5 million. The current record holder for the highest sale of a domain is Sex.com, which sold for $13 million in April. And today, we hear a new domain is on the market which could also bring in millions.
Yahoo has just released some statistics for what they’re seeing from people doing searches with Yahoo on the iPad. The results are a little humorous.
One thing you can say about the Flickr team – there’s some fight in ‘em. They apparently were not super pleased with our coverage of their annual (and unofficial) Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” I’m not sure why, I think the award is fun.
