23 is a photo-sharing site highly-similar to Flickr – right down to the hard-to-initially-remember domain name. I’m watching to see if it’ll get any traction in the upcoming months, and what happens to it a bit further down the road. Will influencers continue to use Flickr or will Yahoo foul up and drive them out, causing them to switch? How much does the rest of the traditional acquiring set regret not buying Flickr? Enough to consider picking up a functionally-similar site? Can imitators capture the market leader’s indie street cred, or does ‘second in’ status sink them? And in general, is it a profitable strategy to be second man into a successful niche?
My theory: opportunities open up for second indies when the leader of the niche gets acquired, but only if the second indie can differentiate itself from the acquired company enough to feel distinct while filling the same core need. Both influencers and potential acquirers are going to be wary of too-similar clones – no one wants to back a rip-off. The second indie won’t be able to grow its community to anywhere near the size of the market leader – zounds, look at Flickr’s growing reach – but if it can manage to differentiate itself and look like it has potential for growth, perhaps it too can be sold, on the strength of its application rather than its user base. If it can’t get sold to the usual set, perhaps it can be sold to old media companies looking for new business opportunities (and incapable of rolling their own solution internally).
I suspect I’ll be better able to see my theory in action when other Web 2.0-ish sites are acquired by the big dogs, as they most certainly will be, and their lesser-known competitors try to take advantage of the disruption…
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Can i tell you a secret. There’s all ready more than 500 photo sharing sites globally – and most of them was there before flickr.
What the real issue is whether we create open standards that drives the massive centralization in terms of data and perspective that flickr has turned into the other way around.
Separating global photo tag overviews from the product. Separating communities from the product.
Creating common infrastructure that ties together photo sharing from whatever service you wanna use. Decentralization the current perspective bloggers and early adopters have of flickr into lot’s of photo sharing sites, phototag search services and photo groups/communities
The need for photo sharing is huge – and at best flickr is supporting 0,5-1% of the global need.
It’s all about the perspective. This space is very big and differentiated.
And if you dig deeper you’ll see that we’re a lot different from flickr.
So there is no way an indie can beat a market leader?
How do these kind of small scale or big scale sites make their money? How would a small scale photo uploading site make money? There are so many free sites – so you would have to be doing something amazing to charge! Is it by means of advertising?
Some ignorant people worship Flickr, instead of celebrating the many choices one has. I for one is happy that 23 provides an alternative to Flickr.