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Slide.com, Rock You - Sites Gaining from Social Network Widgets
June 28, 2007
Widgets that embed content into profiles in social networks are causing a stir in the UK rankings of Photography websites. Our Site Seeing column in this week's Technology Guardian (sorry still not available online so I can't provide a link) is about Slide.com, the photo sharing website, which two weeks ago overtook Flickr to take the #2 position among Photography websites. (Last week, it dropped back down to #3). Last week, Rock You ranked #4.
Photobucket has been the #1 ranked Photography website based on UK visits since February, when it overtook Flickr. Photobucket has held that #1 ranking largely due to traffic from Bebo and MySpace, with 33% of the site's traffic coming from Bebo last week and 22% from MySpace. By contrast, Google was the #1 source of visits to Flickr last week, accounting for 19% of the site's visits, 5% came from Google Images, 4% from Blogger and only 2.4% from MySpace.
The following chart illustrates how different Flickr is from the others and just how important the traffic from social networks is to Rock You and Slide.com.
Last week, 83% of RockYou's traffic came directly from a social network, with 42% coming from Bebo and 37% from Facebook. Similarly, 77% of Slide.com's traffic came directly from a social network, with 43% coming from Facebook, 23% from Bebo and 8% from MySpace. I tried it myself, loading my wedding photos to Slide.com and sharing them both on my Facebook profile and on my personal Wordpress blog. It's incredibly easy to share lots of photos with lots of people!
What this will mean for Flickr remains to be seen. What it does show is that widgets on social networks can drive a pile of traffic and bring a site from relative obscurity to the fore. MySpace has recently clamped down on some such activities potentially putting the future of these photo sharing in jeopardy.
Next week I'll do a follow up post on where social networks send their traffic - in particular what does clickstream traffic tell us about the interests of users of Bebo, MySpace and Facebook and how do they differ.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:08 AM
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Links to weblogs that reference this entry:
- Warum sich Social Network Widgets lohnen (Ranking Konzept - SEO News)
Im Vereinigten Königreich (UK) hat Hitwise einen Blick auf die größten Foto-Seiten geworfen und belegt, dass Widgets die auf sozialen Netzwerken beliebt sind sehr viel Traffic bringen. Zwei Beispiele für den Erfolg mit Widgets sind... [Read More] - hitwise Research Photo Space UK (Mehrdad´s Weblog)
Here you can find the differences between widget based photo companies like rockyou and flickr and how important social network will be in the future. obfuscator('QIT7AQT7CA', 'cRNgkLlqdE9ba8nDFSZt51J7y6wrf0AQiCmUP3hHps4MGVBTejo2IXKOWuYvxz', '__MTTBLIN... [Read More] - Links for 13/07/2007 (Steve Jay's Digital Marketing Blog)
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Comments
Heather, thanks for the timely post, we are evaluating some widget strategies for a client. While the numbers are undeniable, I think we've all been on a social networking site, to only click on a photo and have it take us to photobucket or a similar site. Most of us click the back button and don't ever really traverse the photobucket site.
How do you account for the quality of the traffic?
Thanks!
Posted by Wil Reynolds | July 6, 2007 07:23 AM
Wil, Excellent comment. Thanks. One way to evaluate "quality" of visits is through session duration to look at the average amount of time people spent on the site in a given week or month. Last week, UK consumers spent an average of
- 10 minutes 38 seconds on Flickr,
- 9 minutes 42 seconds on Photobucket
- 6 minutes and 35 seconds on Rock You
- 4 minutes 54 seconds on Slide.com
Flickr's average session duration is longer, likely because you don't have so much traffic flitting in and out from social networks. However, people are not spending an insignificant amount of time on Photobucket, Rock You and Slide.com.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | July 8, 2007 01:24 AM
Very interested in the next column on the various sites - the Nelsen report on Facebook and Bebo growth as well as Danah Boyd on class differences and generational pull-through are pretty inconclusive on the dynamics of growth. In particular, I wonder why minority sites aren't more popular in the UK?
Posted by Chris Marsden | July 2, 2007 05:27 AM