News
123RF unplugged from Flickr
Speculation about when Yahoo's Flickr, the world’s most popular photo sharing site, might enter the micro-stock business has surfaced in stock photo industry circles for months. Last week, it seemed, that day might have arrived when Inmagine announced it had created a Flickr sanctioned plug-in that would allow Flickr-Pro members to place their images in the micro-stock market through Inmagine’s micro-stock site, 123RF. Within twenty four hours of that announcement, however, Flickr revoked Inmagine’s access, rendering the plug-in moot.
Details of the deal-that-wasn’t remain sketchy. 123RF programmers developed the plug-in using Flickr’s API (Application Programming Interface) on their own. According to a spokesperson from 123RF responding to questions after the announcement of the new opportunity for Flickr Pro members but before Flickr had retracted its tacit endorsement of the plug-in, “We are merely using the API to allow Flickr Pro users to easily upload their photos to 123RF under Flickr's API. That is our extent of involvement with regards to Flickr at the moment. We have not negotiated an official or formal partnership with Flickr with regards to this. 123RF will split all revenues of a 50% - 50% basis with all our Contributors. If things go well, and if there is a business model we can develop with Flickr, we would be keen to explore the possibilities. 123RF will only accept hi resolution shots from Flickr users, and specifically, only Flickr Pro users have the ability to transfer high resolution images over to us. 123RF.com encourages Flickr users to upgrade to Flickr Pro to facilitate the easy upload activity. We hope this message will be well received by the Flickr Community and thus, we believe Flickr should note that our implementation of the Flickr API does confer some benefit to it as well.”
Clearly, 123RF misjudged how Flickr would view the “benefit” of permitting the plug-in. The same 123RF spokesperson later said, “The fact is, Flickr revoked our Flickr API Commercial key after 2 weeks of issuing it and within 24 hours of us going live with it.” One can only surmise that Flickr will, eventually, enter the micro-stock business, but will do so on its own terms.
Web: www.123rf.com - www.flickr.com
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