A key idea in Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto was to eliminate redundancy within Yahoo, kill overlapping products that compete with each other.  Yesterday Mr. Peanut-Butter himself, along with Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield broke the news to TechCrunch: Yahoo will shut down Photos, in favor of Flickr.

A lot has been written on this move (see below), let me just point out two seemingly controversial metrics:

The chart shows Flickr’s US traffic has caught up with that of Yahoo Photos.  However, Flickr only has about 20% of the photos stored on Yahoo: 500 million vs. 2 billion. 

How many of us have “layaway” photos stored on Yahoo, that we uploaded buried quite some time ago, never to touch them again?  Flickr’s photos are tagged, searched, used – there is activity.  That’s the difference between dead and alive. 

The contrast in the stats is a perfect illustration for a trend we see with other services, too – although it’s supposed to be Yahoo’s day, Gmail vs Yahoo Mail comes to my mind.  Yahoo has a huge incumbent user base that will never move. Change is evil for them.   Gmail is much smaller, but it picks up the innovator, productivity-oriented crowd – that is if they pull their act together)

Last, but not least, when will Yahoo have it’s Youtube?   “Butterfield also confirmed that Flickr will “soon” allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.”

Related posts:

TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, SmugBlog, mathewingram.com/work, Between the Lines, Scobleizer, Laughing Squid, Digital Inspiration, Ben Metcalfe Blog, Webware.com, parislemon, WebProNews , UNEASYsilence, Read/WriteWeb.

Update:  If it’s up to BillG, Flickr will soon be a Microsoft property, along with the rest of Yahoo.  Others on the subject:

paidContent.org, Between the Lines, Internet Outsider, Rough Type, IP Democracy, Mashable!,  BloggingStocks,  Search Engine Land, WebProNews, TechBlog and franticindustries