Flickr reaches 2 billion photos

A user named yukesmooks from Brisbane, Australia, posted the 2 billionth picture to Flickr Tuesday, a notable milestone for the photo-sharing site.

That's a lot of photos. Its sheer magnitude illustrates the challenge that Microsoft and others face in trying to reproduce what Flickr has built.

The shot itself, artfully named "Picture 098," shows a gum tree, according to the Flickr blog posting noting the achievement.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the trees are called eucalyptus and other, less charitable names because of their rampant spread across the local biome; the handful of leaf-munching koalas at the local zoo haven't been enough to check their weed-like profusion.

OK, I admit it, I'm among those with eucalyptocidal tendencies. But at least the picture itself isn't some photo of inebriated college students mugging red-eyed for the camera.

[anon8mizer]

So...

I never understood the business model behind photo sites. Storage on average costs $20/gb/mo if you want 99.99% uptime. Bandwidth costs $0.10 per gb delivered. I am not sure the photo sites make enough money from advertising to cover the costs. 2 billion photos, each I think on average is about 1mb, will need 2000 tb or $40mm/month or about $500mm/year to maintain the storage space alone. And we don't even count the bandwidth cost to let the highschool kids see the photos.