21
2006
PhotoBucket Leads Photo Sharing Sites; Flickr at #6
In the SF tech bubble that I live in, most of the talk about photo sites has been centered on Flickr. In fact, you could get the impression from most people I meet that Flickr is the ONLY site at which you can share and store photos. Examination of the category however, shows that Flickr is #6 among the top 10 photo sharing sites, with a market share of 5.95%. Industry standbys like Yahoo! Photos, Webshots Community, and Kodak Gallery currently rank higher than Flickr.
Photobucket dominates the category, with a 44% market share. It surpassed Yahoo! Photos in January, and its share of visits increased by 34% in the four months from February 2006 to May 2006. Flickr, my friends should be happy to note, has also been growing rapidly, increasing 44% in the past four months, and up from a rank of #9 in this category one year ago (week ending 6/18/05). Slide has also taken off this spring, with its visits increasing more than ten fold in the past four months.
Photobucket, Slide, and Imageshack are all image hosting sites, and MySpace is their primary source of traffic. In fact, MySpace was responsible for 76% of Slide’s traffic in May 2006, 56% of Photobucket’s traffic, and 50% of Imageshack’s traffic. The growth of Photobucket and Slide go hand in hand the growth of consumer generated content and social networking sites, as I’ve reported before. It’s amazing to consider that the 1.39% of the downstream traffic from MySpace that goes to Photobucket could be largely responsible for Photobucket’s category dominance.
Market share of … ? (Is this US? Worldwide?)
Also, any idea why your data diverges so widely from Comscore and NNR? E.g., Comscore has Flickr and Pohtobucket tied at 16.5M UUs worldwide and Y! Photos nearly twice as large as either.
Even limiting it to the US shows Y!Photos as larger than Photobucket and the UU ratio between Photobucket and Flickr at 2:1 rather than 7:1. In fact, the order is completely different, as are the UU ratios.
You’re not really comparing apples and oranges there;
Flickr is a site for sharing _your_ photographs.
Sites like ImageShack are largely about having
some other sucker host that cute image you found
on some other forum, with a kitten aiming a sniper
rifle. They’re different markets: Flickr is a
photo community. ImageShack is an adverts-for-bandwidth
trade.
LeeAnn,
I’m right there with you, I would’ve never guessed that Flickr wasn’t in the hunt for at least a place on the medal podium.
Obviously there is a difference between scaling and building a scalable, profitable business; but clearly Photobucket’s meteoric rise is noteworthy.
FYI…I used one of your charts in a blog post reaction to your analysis
http://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/2006/06/flickr_not_even.html
Jason
I don’t know, this http://www.alexaholic.com/flickr.com+photobucket.com+webshots.com
makes Flickr look in much better shape.
Alan,
Thanks for your questions. The data reported in my blog is from our sample of 10 million US internet users. We report in market share of visits, which is a different metric than unique visitors.
CL,
I agree that Flickr and Photobucket are different types of photo sites, but what they both do is enable people to share images online, as do all the other sites in the category. Personally, I think it’s quite interesting that there is such a large level of interest in image hosting versus posting photo albums, and demonstrates how the online photo landscape has changed along with the rise of social networking and MySpace.
LeeAnn
Marshall,
The data herein is from Hitwise’s nationally representative US sample of 10 million internet users. We have separate products for our five other markets: UK, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore.
Alexa’s data is global, and self admittedly skewed toward Korea, and does not claim to be representative of the Internet population. Matt Cutts thinks that it’s skewed toward developers, who are probably more likely to use Flickr, and Markus at the Paradigm Shift points out how easy it might be game Alexa’s rankings.
If anyone has questions on Hitwise methodology, please visit or methodology page. There’s even a video!
LeeAnn
I really think this is an apples & oranges comparison. Flickr is a photo sharing community/destination and Photobucket and ImageShack are picture hosting/serving sites that really encourage remote-loading from other communities/destinations like Xanga, MySpace, LiveJournal and Ebay. Yes, you can also link to a photo hosted on Flickr but that is not the site’s primary purpose.
Photobucket is set up to be a pageview generating factory. You get a pageview when you upload, another when you display your image another when you generate the HTML code to paste into MySpace and then their “recommended” code links you from a thumbnail back to their servers for another pageview every time someone request an image.
Is it really fair to compare a photo hosting/serving utility service with a photo sharing destination/community?
Webshots is taking the join-’em vs. fight them approach by launching their own entry into the hosting/serving arena with http://www.allyoucanupload.com. This is a smart move on their part since it will both boost their rankings and drive membership to their Webshots community site.
FWIW, I’d rather be trying to build a sustainable business around a destination/community since as anyone with a big bank of severs and bandwidth can easily jump into the free hosting/serving business and I have to believe the quality of that traffic for advertising can’t be very high.
LeeAnn,
Thank you for clarification on methodology.
I figured if I was responding to the other blogs I should of course respond at the source
As I’ve said in the other posts, if you are a photo enthusiast, enjoy tagging and a sense of community around photos, flickr definitely is the place to be.
But Photobucket’s use case, is not just sharing your album at Photobucket.com the site, since we are not a community destination. But it’s about our users direct linking their content to 60,000 other websites. We promote and encourage direct linking of peoples visual content, no matter what format that is. Photos of course are the majority, but we have users sharing anime, art, animated gif’s, screenshots, and of course Video.
Our average user share that content in multiple ways whether it is to their blog, social networking site, discussion forum, personal webpage, etc. or just email or IM’ing that link to a friend or family member to share at Photobucket.
We just give them ultimate flexibility providing an easy, reliable service. That’s how we’ve been able to grow to over 18 million users and are signing up 75,000 new users a day. We upload over 5 million new images and 30,000 videos daily, which is quite a bit of content
If anyone has questions, you can ask me directly at peter@photobucket.com
Thanks,
Peter
“Life’s Better in The Bucket!”
Flickr is a photo sharing community/destination and Photobucket and ImageShack are picture hosting/serving sites that really encourage remote-loading from other communities/destinations like Xanga, MySpace, LiveJournal and Ebay. Yes, you can also link to a photo hosted on Flickr but that is not the site’s primary purpose.
You are trying to make a distinction without a difference. Flickr’s purpose is irrelevant – how are people really using it?
I have noticed that on the forums I use most frrequently – not inhabited by the technorati – that Photobucket is the most commonly recommended.
I think that if you check back to a time before myspace and other social net working sites you will be surprised at how fast Photobucket was growing in popularity on its own. This was all done through word of mouth because it is the best and easiest way to store your photos and now your video content. Photobucket has many advantages over other photo storage sites.
Flickr is hard to use. Whenever I send my non-tech savvy family there, no one can figure out what to do. I wish I hadn’t invested so much time into becoming a Flickr user. — Andy B.
Why is fotopic.net not mentioned here? I find it hard to believe that they would fall below most of the services listed. My conclusion is that the process used to gather the above measurements does not necessarily reflect the service which “leads photo sharing sites”. And no, I’m not affiliated with them, just a happy user who has seen them explode in popularity over the years, as you can see in http://www.fotopic.net/stats/. I agree that for some reason Flickr is always mentioned when people talk about photo sharing sites, but this seems more like a good demonstration of how ideas or concepts can become self-propogating (remember the Crazy Frog), and not so much a reflection of any lead in photo sharing. Just my 0.02 quid. Chris.
Hi Chris,
The data reported here is US data, and I’m guessing Fotopic.net gets most of its traffic from UK and other countries. It does not currently have a statistically significant ranking in the US.
LeeAnn
Wanted to let you know that I used this very interesting post/data as an example for a blog post that I just sent up. I’ve been working on some thoughts and definitions surrounding how to fit concepts of “socialness” into marketing and business dialogues, since there is lots of buzz about making everything “social” and “2.0″ these days. The differences you and your commentors point out between how the various photosharing sites opperate made for an extremely helpful example.
Thanks for the information.
imageshack.us is the number one ,the best
I visited flicr for the first time yesterday. There were such amazing pictures. But absolutely loved the following: http://www.flickr.com/photos/valpopando/213293908/
This is the place of my dreams.
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