No Money in Printed Flickr?

Back in May 2008, I wrote about a new publishing venture, 8020 Publishing, and their magazines, Everywhere and JPG.

They had an intriguing idea — magazines based on user-submitted (amateur) content. And they had plenty of content, enough to run the magazines for years.

How quickly things can change. Everywhere is dead. JPG is on life-support.

The supply was fine. It was the demand that was too low. As the Grim Reaper from Magazine Death Pool put it:

Cross Flickr with magazine publishing and you get JPG, where anybody could submit photos and hope they would get published. Of course, this admirable concept was bound to fail because you can, uh, just go to Flickr or Google Images and find all the images you want for free.

It’s ironic in this context then that Flickr is considering buying JPG. Maybe they think there is money in print? Or maybe these are just rumors, meant to create some sort of bidding war to benefit 8020? No matter what, the value of the print Flickr (JPG) won’t ever approach a fraction of the online Flickr’s value.

Just a little housekeeping here in the Kitchen. No reason to leave scraps lying on the floor. We like to run a tidy operation.