Yesterday, Flickr announced changes to their service. Pro subscriptions are doubling from $24 to $49 per year. If you opt for a free account, you get a flat 1TB of space.

When the price doubles, a lot of users will switch to the free accounts and will start seeing advertisements. From what I’ve seen, most people are excited and positive about the new look and the drop in cost, but most people are missing the real implications.

It’s obvious that Yahoo believes Flickr can bring in a lot more revenue by serving ads than by attracting user subscriptions. Starting May 20th, Flickr is no longer a user-supported service: it’s an advertising platform. We’ve been down this road before with other services and it usually doesn’t turn out well for users.