When I first wrote about Photobucket last year, many people were surprised by the large amount of traffic it received, as its traffic was mainly driven by users uploading images and posting on their MySpace or other social network pages. Traffic to Photobucket has continued to grow along with MySpace and social networking – from March 2006 to March 2007 its market share of US visits increased by 113% and it captured 41% of visits to the Hitwise Entertainment – Photography category, which contains more than 1,400 websites.

Yahoo! Photos still receives a greater market share of visits than Flickr, but Flickr’s traffic is catching up, growing by 68% from March 2006 to March 2007. You can see in the above table that photo sharing sites like Yahoo! Photos, Flickr, and Kodak Gallery receive much less traffic from MySpace than the sites that allow users to post content on other pages, which means that usage of photo sharing sites is mainly limited uploading and viewing activities.
In contrast, traffic to a site like Slide, which allows users to tell stories through slide shows that can be posted on social networks and other pages around the web, consists mainly of users uploading and personalizing their content that will be posted and viewed elsewhere. Traffic to Slide has grown by more than 2000% from March 2006 to March 2007, and if you consider that the slide shows posted around the web are branded, its presence is far greater than its market share would imply. Similarly, some bloggers have Flickr photosets embedded in their blogs, but they are not necessarily branded.
Usage of photo sites varies widely by generation – the chart below shows the age group swing between Photobucket and Kodak Gallery. 40.9% of traffic to Photobucket came from 18-24 year olds for the four weeks ending 3/31/07, while only 8.8% of Kodak Gallery’s traffic was from that age group. Kodak Gallery’s two largest age groups were 55+, at 33% of traffic, and 24-34, at 27% of traffic, indicating sharing between new parents and grandparents.

Teens and young adults approach photo sharing very differently from the older generation – their social network pages are the distribution points for their photographs, rather than albums on photo sharing sites. They also invest more time in personalizing and adding features to their images. Flickr bridges the gap to some extent, by combining the social networking features with photo sharing, but not necessitating the ownership of another social network account for communication and sharing.