IDEA #55 - Flickr photo editing and printing software
By Steve Poland • April 26, 2007
Fact: There are tons of (Yahoo-owned) Flickr users.
I’ve always been intrigued by affiliate marketing — which basically allows you to promote something, then get paid if someone buys that product/service as a result of your promotion. I think there’s an opportunity to join affiliate marketing campaigns for all the photo printing companies (Shutterfly, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Ofoto, etc) and by using the Flickr API, you could create some Windows/Mac software (using Apollo?) that allows people to do some quick edits to their photos — and easily re/upload them (a la Google’s Picasa software). Then allow people to easily get their photos printed via the photo printing services you have affiliate marketing campaigns with — this will allow you to earn income from the users of your software (that you give away for free). If your software is good enough, then tons of Flickr users will come and use your software, and hopefully easily get their photos printed via your software.
The big affiliate marketing companies (”aggregators” basically) are Commission Junction, Linkshare, and Performics (which is Google-owned Doubleclick’s division).
P.S. Here’s another cool way to earn money via affiliate marketing with Flickr — upload photos of products, or take photos of products, then link them to an affiliate marketing link. Example, upload a photo of an Apple TV and link it to somewhere that the user could buy it — such as Amazon.com, but using your affiliate account with Amazon, so that if someone buys the product, you earn money!
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6 Responses to “IDEA #55 - Flickr photo editing and printing software”
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Interesting idea. The trick would be introducing features that allowed the user to do something that isn’t available through the editing software they are currently using. I’m thinking something along the lines of making cards, stationary, playing card decks, etc. would be much more attractive to potential users then red-eye tools and cropping.
Might be good as a low end photoshop plugin- get a partnership with adobe so they can bundle a free version with the product and make some upsell gold.
How about add a function: embedding Google text-ads in photos?
since we got lots of titles, tags, descriptions on each photo/page which provide enough contextual info.
Picnik (http://www.picnik.com) is doing some some of these things to a degree and it’s built in Flex which could easily ported to Apollo. With Adobe’s online version of Photoshop, which I believe will have a free version, on the horizon it will be interesting to see how they generate revenue from it. Maybe using some similar tactics you mentioned.
boo-box.com already offers this feature
@azzam is speaking about my ‘P.S.’ in the post, not flickr photo editing software that’s already been built.