"Second, you can tell a lot about a product by how it makes money. Giving away vast amounts of storage creates data that can be sold to advertisers, with the inevitable result being that advertisers’ interests are prioritized over yours. ...."

So I fork out $50/yr and Flickr will stop flogging my data to advertisers or, will grow a very specific group of users, whos data is more valuable to advertisers than the general free membership .... and Flickr will then flog that to advertisers at a premium?

I would have preferred to see improvements to Flickr before a push to subscriptions. My guess is that for the money I can find much better established services, tho in fairness I have not looked, so may be wrong on that. I guess I am about to find out.