14 DAY TRIAL // Flickr is the most popular photo-sharing service in the world, if you don’t count Facebook as one, and is probably one of the most misspelled domains on earth as well. Its trend-setting name, Flickr, may be pronounced ‘flicker,’ but its domain name is flickr.com. In fact, Yahoo, which owns Flickr, has had plenty of troubles with the owners of the flicker.com domain, but, thankfully, the company has finally managed to take control of it.
The Domains first reported that flicker.com is listed as belonging to Yahoo, when doing a simple whois search. This has been the case for the past several weeks, apparently, though, since Yahoo didn’t make it public, no one noticed. Typically, when a large company wants a domain that is unavailable, it just shoves a big amount of money in front of the domain-name owners to get them to sell.
It didn’t work for Yahoo in this case, despite reportedly offering $600,000 for flicker.com. So it opted for the second most popular option, suing under anti-cybersquatting law. The problem was that Yahoo didn’t really have much to work with. The flicker.com domain name had been registered several years before Flickr even existed. While the domain was used mostly as a fly trap for unsuspecting users trying to get to Flickr and being served with ads instead, legally, Yahoo didn’t have much of a case.
However, the parties involved settled out of court and Yahoo dismissed the suit. There’s no word on how much Yahoo ended up paying after all. Still, the company must be glad to have the whole thing behind it and help users get to the right place even if they don’t know how to spell it. There’s a lot of people too, it looks like flicker.com was getting about 3.6 million unique yearly visitors. It currently still routes to the old page, but this should change soon. [via Domain Name Wire]