Flicker.com Attempts To Capitalize With Its Correctly Spelled Name

Many people are familiar with Flickr, the popular image sharing site owned by Yahoo, but, how many actually know the difference between Flickr and Flicker (with the e)?  Well, it seems many people (approximately 3.6 million) are not aware of the difference.  Flicker.com was registered in 1998 which is approximately five years before Flickr.com was registered for use as the image sharing service in 2003.

According to the stats published on the front page of Flicker.com, they are receiving 3.6 million unique visits per year. Of that 3.6 million, over 95% of those visits come from direct navigation. In other words, people who want to go to Flickr.com but don’t realize it’s spelled without the “e” are typing in Flicker.com to the address bar only to find a message that the site is “down for maintenance”.

In addition, Flicker is telling people to tweet about the maintenance (and people are doing it too!) with a link back to their site which in return makes Flickr look bad.  Unfortunately for Flickr and Flicker, Yahoo is trying to help keep itself afloat recently by selling off some of its awesome domain names such as contests.com.  I doubt they really want to go out and purchase Flicker.com for a ridiculous sum of money.

It also appears that Flicker is using some shady affiliate tactics to make some quick cash.  They are providing bit.ly links to various photography equipment sites on their front page.  I can only assume these are masked affiliate links which will generate some revenue for them while they sit with the domain (which may be for quite some time).  My question to Flicker.com, why not sell some ad space?  You have the traffic.