Flicker (No, Not That One) Bares Its Stats In An Attempt To Get Rich

picture-316Flickr, Yahoo’s photo property, is one of the largest picture sharing services in the world. However, if you were to ask a group of random people how you spell its domain, a high percentage would likely tell you F-L-I-C-K-E-R. That’s not surprising, but it’s undoubtedly longstanding a headache for Yahoo. And now the people who own Flicker.com are looking to capitalize on it.

If you visit the site, you’ll see that it now exposes its traffic stats in the lower right-hand corner. It’s a blatant attempt to make money, at the very least from advertisers willing to throw links on the page. Or presumably to get someone to buy the domain.

Here are the stats they publish:

Flicker by the numbers:

Unique Visits:
3.6MM /yr

Source:
Direct Navigation (95.74%)

Outbound Clicks:
400K /yr

CPC Keyword Values:
(Photography equipment)
$2.50 -$3.00 /click

Daily Value to Advertisers:
$2700.00 – $3300.00

(Data is approximate, tracking by Google Analytics)

Below that is a link to contact them.

You’ll notice that over 95% of the traffic comes from direct navigation. That’s because if you Google “Flicker,” you’ll find flickr.com first, and flicker.com nowhere to be found on the first page of results. And that means that millions of people each year are typing in “flicker.com” likely expecting flickr.com. Certainly, that’s worth something, and Flicker knows it.

But the people who own flicker.com probably shouldn’t hold their breath for Yahoo to buy the domain anytime soon. After all, they’re busy selling off their own killer domain names on the cheap to make money.

And so the site is resorting to rather shady tactics. While its main page claims that it’s down for maintenance, there’s a Twitter button right next to that to tweet out that it’s down for maintenance. You might think that most sites wouldn’t want people to know that they’re site is down, but not Flicker. That’s because they clearly want people to advertise on their new “down” website.

And it’s working, look at how many people are actually tweeting this garbage out. You can be sure that a lot of them think Yahoo’s Flickr is down, and they’re just trying to let others know. Flicker has its own Twitter account that highlights all these tweets.

On the site below its maintenance message, you’ll find a bunch of links to camera equipment (the same group Flicker directly appeals to with its ‘CPC Keyword Value’ stats). And just to keep things even more shady, all of these links are bit.ly shortened links.

Update: As commenter Noah points out, some of those Bit.ly links aren’t exactly bathing in traffic. This one has only 500 clicks in the past two weeks.

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