It’s been reported before that Verizon was about to acquire Yahoo. Now it’s officially done – Verizon is a new owner of Yahoo, along with Flickr, their (once) popular photo sharing platform. Verizon has acquired Yahoo for $4.48 billion, and they plan to combine it with AOL and create a new service called Oath.
As a consequence of the merger of Yahoo and AOL, 2100 employees will be made redundant. But in spite of this, the CEO of AOL, Tim Armstrong, has a plan of creating one of the biggest brand-focused companies in the world. According to DPReview, Oath’s goal is to compete with other major services like Facebook and Google, which Yahoo obviously wasn’t capable of.
As for Flickr, there is still no news of changes. For now, there are no announcements about the change of pricing or the layout of the platform. What I’ve only notices (yes, I still use Flickr) is that they have altered the look of the profile page a bit.
In recent years, Flickr’s popularity is rapidly dropping, so it’s questionable whether it’s still profitable. From here, there are probably only two possible solutions (and maybe I’m too optimistic). First, Verizon could give it a makeover, try and make it more active and raise its popularity again. Or second, they could decide it’s not profitable and shut it down.
I still love Flickr, probably because that was the platform that made me start sharing my images in the first place. But frankly, it seems like soon there will only be crickets and tumbleweed left. Still, I would love to see it bring its old popularity back, and it’s what I’ll be hoping for from this acquisition.
What do you think? Could Flickr bring its old popularity back? Or the number of users will just continue to drop?
[via DPReview]
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