The company has made the decision only recently

Mar 3, 2009 12:01 GMT  ·  By

Since Monday, the popular photo-sharing website Flickr has started allowing users of its free services the possibility to upload small videos to the site's servers, in what appears to be a bid to challenge YouTube's and Google's dominance of this market. Behind the popular portal is Yahoo!, which seems to be trying to take on Google again. However, users of the service seem to be pleased with the decision, and some have already begun uploading their materials since yesterday.

“Previously limited to our Pro members, video on Flickr is now available for all. Our free account members can now share 2 videos a month. So, this is a perfect time for you to check out video mode on your camera,” Shanan Delp says on the site's official blog. “We are continuing to evolve the video experience to make it more compelling, accessible and easy to use. So grab your cameras, and capture and share 'long photos' of your own!” Kakul Srivastava, the company's general manager, adds.

Thus far, only users who have paid for their subscriptions have been allowed the right to upload videos on the servers. For $25 each month, they could even load High Definition (HD) clips, to everyone's benefit. But now the management believes that the feature is best off left to all the users who have an account with the page. This is the natural thing to do, considering that the site has already built a sturdy base of members all by itself. If it could become the main source of videos for its viewers alone, it would still mean a hit from YouTube.

One of the best features of the upload video function on Flickr is the “geo-tag,” which permits viewers to see the location of the uploader. Thus, by checking out multiple videos, people can get the general idea of what's happening around the world at the click of a button. “We are not trying to be the highest volume site, but we are trying to be the most interesting, authentic and personal. We want to let people share personal content like your child playing in a baseball game or a birthday party with friends,” Srivastava commented last year, when the service was first launched for paying customers.

According to various estimates, Flickr is now visited by 73 million individuals each month, and boasts some 35 million registered users. The company has it that, on average, more than 3 million photos are uploaded on the site daily, which means that its popularity is growing at a very fast pace.