Two photo-sharing services are teaming up, as SmugMug buys Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath.
USA Today broke the news and interviewed SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who said he hopes to revitalize Flickr.
At the same time, he said he’s still figuring out his actual plans: “It sounds silly for the CEO to not to totally know what he’s going to do, but we haven’t built SmugMug on a master plan either. We try to listen to our customers and when enough of them ask for something that’s important to them or to the community, we go and build it.”
Flickr was founded in 2004 and sold to Yahoo a year later. Yahoo, in turn, was acquired by Verizon, which brought it together with AOL to create a new subsidiary called Oath.
Over the past couple months, Oath (which owns TechCrunch) has been selling off some of its AOL and Yahoo properties, including Moviefone (sold to the company behind MoviePass, which Oath now has a stake in) and Polyvore (assets sold to Ssense).
In an FAQ about the deal, SmugMug says it will continue to operate Flickr as a separate site, with no merging of user accounts or photos: “Over time, we’ll be migrating Flickr onto SmugMug’s technology infrastructure, and your Flickr photos will move as a part of this migration — but the photos themselves will remain on Flickr.”
The company also uses the FAQ to describe its vision for the combined services:
SmugMug and Flickr represent the world’s most influential community of photographers, and there is strength in numbers. We want to provide photographers with both inspiration and the tools they need to tell their stories. We want to bring excitement and energy to inspire more photographers to share their perspective. And we want to be a welcome place for all photographers: hobbyist to archivist to professional.
The financial terms were not disclosed.
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