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 are working on an online game, Game Neverending.
Fake said that many in Ludicorp were disappointed to forgo Game Neverending, but they also realised that Flickr was a rising source of success for them.
Flickr's first version was built in 8 weeks, as Ludicorp already had the necessary technology and software from Game Neverending. It was essentially 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. According to Fake, herself and Butterfield were both bloggers in their spare time and this was beneficial for them when creating the site. 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. Fake said that they allowed this as at the time publicly viewable content was not a feature on other social media platforms.
According to Fake, Flickr “turned the tide for Ludicorp,” as with the failure of Game Neverending, the company was struggling. By the end of 2004 Flickr was worth approximately US$25 million. This led to many companies having interest in acquiring Ludicorp, one such company being Yahoo!.
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. Furthermore, as Yahoo! did not focus on the development of Flickr it became difficult to monetize becoming unprofitable for Ludicorp and Yahoo!. Realising this, Yahoo! sold Flickr to SmugMug, causing Ludicorp to lose its main product. Although Ludicorp no longer owns Flickr as Yahoo! sold the product, not the company.
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