Services like these market themselves to content creators as easy ways to share and promote content. Yet that's analogous to what Flickr is doing with some of the images it hosts.

Ditto if you were a writer and WattPad started offering cloth-bound editions of your work without paying you. If you were a musician and SoundCloud were to start selling high-quality vinyl pressings of the music you uploaded and not share revenue with you, you probably wouldn't like it.

In the same way, photographers put samples of their work on Flickr in hopes that, for example, an art director at an ad agency or a photo editor at a newspaper might be interested. A trade book publisher might acquire a work of fiction after reading it on WattPad, or a Hollywood studio might option the film rights. A record label A&R person might be trolling SoundCloud to find her next big signing or fans might discover a new band, see their local gigs, and purchase a few t-shirts. Professional (and would-be professional) photographers often upload their images onto Flickr for the same reason that musicians upload their songs onto SoundCloud or writers upload their stories onto WattPad: to get exposure that could help lead to being paid down the road. How much of that revenue do the people who took those pictures get? In most cases, none of it. With Flickr Wall Art, users can select from tens of millions of images on the site and purchase professional-quality framed prints.

Flickr, the giant photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo!, has raised a ruckus among professional photographers with a service it has been introducing over the past few weeks called Flickr Wall Art.

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