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Flickr #1 Photography Site in UK
August 31, 2006
Flickr has taken the #1 spot in our Photography category and it seems to be down to good SEO (search engine optimisation) for soft porn searches. I'll admit it was a bit of a surprise last week when I looked at our Photography category and noticed that Flickr had moved into the #1 spot. The last time I'd looked at this was in the Spring, when Flickr ranked behind Photobucket and Community Webshots.
In the week to 17th June 2006, Flickr became the #1 website based on share of UK visits in the Hitwise - Photography category. In the past three months, whilst Flickr's market share of UK visits has increased 39%, Photobucket's has decreased 17% and Community Webshot's has remained flat.
SEO and Soft Porn
A quick analysis of Flickr's clickstream and search terms led me to the conclusion that Flickr has grown through good SEO and specifically searches for soft-porn. Flickr received 33% of its visits from search engines last week, compared to 13% and 28% respectively for Photobucket and Community Webshots.
Whilst there were 3,597 unique search terms sending visits to Flickr in the past four weeks, there were only 651 for Photobucket and 1,475 for Community Webshots. The top terms sending visits to Flickr are searches for the brand ("flickr", "flickr.com" and "flicker") and soft porn terms ("boobs", "transvestite" and "nudity" to name a few tame terms). Not only are there more terms sending visits to Flickr, but the brand name terms account for a smaller share of the site's visits. Whilst the term "flickr" accounted for 9.47% of site visits for Flickr.com in the past four weeks, the term "photobucket" accounted for 47.03% of visits to Photobucket.com. There are a handful of soft-porn terms sending visits to Community Webshots, but not nearly the volume as for Flickr.
The MySpace Effect
You may be wondering why this is so different in the UK and the US. LeeAnn (our Director of Research in the US) did a post in June showing that Photobucket ranked #1 in the US whilst Flickr came in at #6. She found that MySpace was a huge source of visits for Photobucket in the US, as it is in the UK. MySpace accounted for 22% of Photobucket's upstream UK visits last week, compared to only 1.45% for Flickr. But the MySpace effect is much more important in the US than in the UK. MySpace recently became the #1 ranked website in the US, based on share of US visits. In the UK, MySpace ranked #12 last week behind Bebo at #10.
Bebo users appear to be less attached to Photobucket. Last week, 0.35% of downstream visits from Bebo went to websites in the Entertainment - Photography category, compared to 2.06% from MySpace. As mentioned above, 22% of Photobucket's visits came from MySpace, compared to 0.98% from Bebo.
I have been promising a few of you a post comparing adoption of Web 2.0 sites in the UK versus the US. Stay tuned - more to come on that in the coming weeks.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 12:30 PM
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Comments
Simon, Thanks for your note. We categorise Piczo in our Net Communities and Chat category and I didn't mention it in this post as the site is not in the Photography category. The reason is that Piczo is about creating an individual page and is about much more than photos.
That being said, Piczo got more than double the market share of UK visits compared with Flickr in the week to 19th August 2006.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | August 31, 2006 03:39 AM
I think the thing to note about flickr is that the quality of the photos is much higher than most other photo sites. At Tabblo we find that the Flickr users who come over pretty regularly have some of the best pictures around.
Posted by Antonio | August 31, 2006 03:48 PM
Hi Heather,
How much of International traffic (with local being the US) does Flickr receive?
Or,
What about the industry, Entertainment: Photography?
Thanks,
David
Posted by David Hosei | October 11, 2006 10:56 AM
David, Thanks for your comment. I am unable to tell you the percentage of Flickr's traffic that comes from non-US sources. Their site centric stats would be the best source for that. We report on the US, UK, and several Asia Pacific markets. Since these markets represent only a fraction of the world population, we don't aggregate these to report global figures. I can tell you however, that Flickr is much more popular in the UK than in the US, ranking #112 among all categories of websites based on share of UK visits last week compared with #270 based on share of US visits. The UK market is much smaller than the US market, and so it is unlikely that Flickr gets a larger share of its own traffic from the UK. Hitwise data provides an excellent view within a market of the relative strengths and weaknesses of sites. Most online marketing campaigns are done locally and since our business focus is to help marketers make smarter online marketing decisions, we report all of our data by market.
Hope that helps.
Best,
Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | October 12, 2006 12:26 AM
What's happened to Piczo, Heather? According to the Guardian in January, Nielsen reckoned it was the 'fastest-growing internet brand in the UK in 2005, (with) 1.2 million in the last month of 2005.' Or is that not enough to dent the 'top ten'?
Posted by Simon Dickson | August 31, 2006 02:36 AM