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Ludicorp was a company based in Vancouver, Canada, that created Flickr and Game Neverending. It was founded in 2002 by Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake and Jason Classon and was bought by Yahoo! on March 20, 2005.
Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield met as web designers living in San Francisco and Vancouver respectively when they met. Fake moved to Vancouver and the two got married, starting Ludicorp with Classon, just after their honeymoon. Fake says that the inspiration for the name Ludicorp came from the Latin word ludus, meaning play, as they were working on an online game, Game Neverending.
According to Fake, “Neopets was one of the inspirations for Game Neverending,” a game where online multiplayer interaction was available. It was meant to be a game that would not end, and there was no concept of winning or losing in it. Game Neverending was finished and released in 2002. Game Neverending eventually became Ludicorp's major project, Flickr.
Flickr's first version was built in 8 weeks using the technology and software from Game Neverending. It was a social networking site, allowing users to post and share pictures they had taken, without any help from professional companies. Its fast growth was pushed by the increasing popularity of social networking sites, such as YouTube, and the increasing availability of smartphones with built in cameras.
Although many users were professional photographers, Flickr was aimed at those who found photography as a hobby. Ludicorp created Flickr in a way that it filled a hole in the market; other competitors did not allow bloggers to post pictures. Ludicorp also added many first ever features in Flickr, such as “authing in,” being able to change the amount of information you share with your friends and activity streams.
Ludicorp also designed Flickr to be more focused on content, rather than as a social interaction site, unlike a platform such as Facebook. Users can follow other users in a non-mutual subscription model, like YouTube. Furthermore, content can be viewed without the subscription, another first for social media sites in 2004. At that time, publicly viewable content was not a feature on other social media platforms.
By the end of 2004 Flickr was worth approximately US$25 million. This led to Yahoo! becoming interested in acquiring Ludicorp.
In the years that Yahoo! owned Ludicorp, its main product Flickr peaked and then began to decline, with other social media networks taking over, such as Instagram and Snapchat. Yahoo! did not focus on the development of Flickr and it became unprofitable for Ludicorp and Yahoo!. Yahoo! sold Flickr to SmugMug, causing Ludicorp to lose its main product.
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