Photo hosting platform SmugMug has bought Flickr for an undisclosed sum of money, USA Today has reported.
SmugMug will continue to run Flickr as a standalone photo-sharing platform, SmugMug’s CEO, Don MacAskill, told the paper.
“Flickr is an amazing community, full of some of the world’s most passionate photographers. It’s a fantastic product and a beloved brand, supplying tens of billions of photos to hundreds of millions of people around the world,” MacAskill said. “Flickr has survived through thick-and-thin and is core to the entire fabric of the Internet.”
Flickr was founded in 2004 and then quickly bought by Yahoo a year later. When Yahoo was purchased by Verizon last year for $4.5 billion, there was speculation that the photo-sharing website could be on the move.
Though traffic has declined in recent years, USA Today reports that Flickr still boasts 75 million accounts and more than 100 million unique users.
MacAskill also tells USA Today that despite the acquisition, he does not yet know what SmugMug’s plans are for Flickr.
“I don’t know what the future holds. This is a new model for me,” he said. “We certainly think we need to operate it with an eye to our cash flow and our profitability. We are going to have to take a detailed look at the business and make sure it’s growing and healthy.”