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TIME looks behind the purple curtain of one of America's biggest web players
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Photographs for TIME by Timothy Archibald |
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O P E N I N G N E W D O O R S
Although Google successfully snapped up YouTube last year for $1.65 billion, Yahoo! snagged a bargain in buying Flickr. Before Yahoo! acquired Flickr for about $30 million in March 2005, the start-up photo site met with various possible suitors, including Google. "People [at Google] would be an hour late and meetings would drag on for three or four hours with people coming in and out," says Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, who is now Director of Product Management for Yahoo! "It was hard to get a sense of how we would fit in." While Yahoo!'s VP of Product Strategy Bradley Horowitz and Senior VP Jeff Weiner were enthusiastic advocates for the acquisition, Butterfield says, Google's Picasa team wasn't sure Flickr would blend well with their existing photo tools. Since joining Yahoo!, Flickr's audience has grown significantly. It now hosts 324 million photos, with another million uploaded daily.
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