One of the top stories in the blogosphere today is a new Hitwise chart finding that Photobucket has a 46% leading market share in online photosharing and that Flickr is in 6th place with only 6%.
This was a big surprise for parts of the blogosphere where Flickr is a hot topic.
I looked up these two sites on Alexaholic and found traffic results quite different from the Hitwise graph. Many people have long alleged that Alexa produces low-quality results, is easy to game and is worthy of lots of other criticism. If that’s is the case, is Yahoo! really the most visited site on the web? Is MySpace really number 5? Many of us talk about those numbers, from Alexa, often. (Though Hitwise seems to find similar numbers.)
Graph below: Flickr traffic in blue, Photobucket in red. Webshots.com in green.
Speaking of graphs, here’s some interesting ones that quantify what many people in today’s discussion are saying: the loudest voices in the blogosphere are missing the boat by talking about Flickr all the time. Flickr may be worthy of blog coverage for its innovation or it’s participation in innovative communities or its role in controversy - but among most of the bloggers online Photobucket is a much hotter topic!
Check out these graphs, measuring the times that the words Flickr or Photobucket appear in blogs with many inbound links (”high authority”) according to Technorati vs. in blogs without many inbound links. I think the results are remarkable.
Here’s some imprecise but telling math: high-authority bloggers appear to write about Flickr about 3 times as often as they (we) write about Photobucket. The blogosphere as a whole uses the word Photobucket 3 or more times as often as we use the word Flickr. (TechCrunch has used the word Flickr 11 times more often than the word Photobucket.) Does that mean high-authority bloggers are out of touch with the bulk of users? It may; it may also mean that being interesting doesn’t equate with mass adoption.
In the graphs below, “high authority” on top, all blogs on bottom, Flickr mentions on left, Photobucket mentions on right.
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Interesting stats for sure. To me, it means that one site is a complex and interesting site to talk about on many levels and the other site is a more popular site that is generally only discussable on the most basic of levels. In other words:
1. “Flickr’s interestingness algorithm just added another facet which should serve to help users find popular things faster.”
vs.
2. “Doodz… my Photobucket account is fux0red. How can I fix it.?”
This is not a knock on either service. It’s just that one is doing more of the innovating and one is doing more of the volume… which is quite common… which is exactly what you’re saying I think.
I’m pretty sure these you’re interpreting these numbers incorrectly. HTTP GETs do not necessarily yield popularity or even an active user base.
Most of the uses of photobucket are for direct inclusion of an image on another service. So you have a photo of your daughter which you want to include in your pimped up myspace so you have photobucket host the image.
Most people aren’t aware that photobucket was responsible for the page loading.
I’m willing to be that if you did a random statistical sampling of a MySpace user and asked them whether they have used or are aware of Flickr vs Photobucket that Flickr would come out on top.
For the record I think both are cool services and won’t have a problem being proven wrong it just doesn’t seem to add up.
I have accounts on both Flickr and Photobucket. I must say that it took longer, at least for me, to get used to the flickr way, what with sets and such. To me Photobucket is exactly that, a bucket with pictures with little organization. I can quickly upload a picture and get on with life. Even newbs can quickly understand that. Try explaining to my mom what sets and tagging and such are. Flickr, in my opinion needs a tour guide of some sorts.
Kevin, I thought about your first question for sure. I’m not so sure you’re right about the sample of MySpace users though. For one thing, the photos from Photobucket that I see on MySpace all link to Photobucket.com when I hover over them - and I think many MySpace users are pretty savvy about their widgets, etc. at least in terms of who they are served by.
Marshall,
Technorati includes blogs from MySpace and Livejournal users. Almost all the mentions of Photobucket come from those sources. MySpace users never link to each other, hence their low authority. Pretty simple, really.
I think similar things happen all over the tech space. You see people babble on and on in their blogs about Gmail but waaaaay more people use Hotmail.
BTW: I posted my thoughts on the Flickr vs PhotoBucket meme earlier today:
http://mashable.com/2006/06/22.....rrelevant/
I think the takeaway is that MySpace is definitely worth tapping into.
One of the problems with “top-10″ lists is that you have to assume the editors included every possible company in the category. In this case, they ommitted multiply.com, a photo (and video and blog) sharing service.
Previous comment ate the img tag. Please see:
http://tinyurl.com/jgl2n
Peter - I did some research into Multiply a few weeks ago. Even if they were considered a “photo-sharing” service, I don’t think they’d quite make it onto the list (but admittedly, my stats may be out).
The best of Hitwise is when the properties have very similar structures and audiences - they model traffic from proxy logs. Any university proxy log of more than say 5M hits a day will approxmate the populat internet. If sites have dissimilar structures and audiences then whatever you want to see you will. Anyone who has tried to reconstruct activity from proxy logs will understand the number of assumptions that need to be made.
Alexa is best when the audience of the property matches the Alexa sample.
Neither of these two services really offer measurement that meets transparent standards - they offer an interesting and useful view of comparative activity within the constraints of their respective approaches.
Hitwise has always been very careful about what they say it is they do and don’t do. They also haven’t ever released their modelling so noone really knows the rules they use. It’s long tail comparison - the closer the site structures and the closer the audiences then the better the comparison.
If you want audience measurement that is reasonably transparent for popular properties then listen to Comscore and Netratings - although occasionaly they mess it up as well.
Ahh back to arcane debates about ‘when is a visit a visit’. Most people who work in traffic analysis see this kind of thing all the time but decide it’s better not to mess with the commonly accepted understanding of ‘visit’ - in public anyway - people just don’t understand and you usually end up looking stupid.
Lol, it seems the only thing that can seen as solid is the Technorati graphs. Those are relatively straightforward.
I’m not surprised at all that Flickr has more page views than Photobucket because Flickr is a destination site while Photobucket isn’t. Many people go to Flickr to view pictures or to search for pictures. Most people who go to Photobucket just go there to upload pictures.
Typically, people who browse significantly outnumber people who upload/post. TechCrunch is the perfect example. According to Alexa, TechCrunch is one of the most visited sites on the net (Alexa rank for last week = 920). And yet, there’s probably less than a 100 comments posted by visitors per day.
A much more accurate method for measuring popularity of Photobucket vs. Flickr is to get data from a large random sample of MySpace profiles. Try to figure out the percent of those MySpace profiles store their pics on Flickr vs. Photobucket. That would yield a much more accurate picture of which site is more popular as a photo storage site.
I think most people who are are in the web 2.0 space don’t know that we’ve been around for 3 years now, and provide just a very simple and reliable service for you to host your images AND Video for you to direct link to your site of choice.
The rest of the world knows who we are though as we currently we serve images to 60,000 unique websites, and have over 18 million users. They aren’t the tech bloggers of the world, it’s just the average person wanting a simple service. We also host all types of images, photos, animated gifs, screenshots, and did I mention Video?
We are not a flickr, nor will be. If you are a photo enthusiast, want tagging, and a community then flickr is the choice.
If you want direct linking, and full flexibility with all visual content, Photobucket is the choice. An average Photobucket user links to multiple places. For example, the same image or video might be used in a blog, a social network, a discussion forum post, IM’d or emailed. Host once, publish many.
We currently upload over 5 million images a day, 30,000 videos a day and serve over 2 billion requests a day.
Oh and we are signing up 75,000 new users a day.
I hope you try our service, check out the cool flash widgets. Video is also super easy.
If you have questions you can email me directly peter@photobucket.com
Thanks!
Peter
Different tools for different jobs.
It is clear, to me at least, that they are addressing different market segments. Flickr appears to target people who take their photos seriously, and therefore value the advanced feature set. That many (most?) “influential” bloggers seem to favor Flickr is no surprise. I don’t imagine Wal-Mart is very popular with said “influentials”, but you can’t beat Wal-Mart for volume.
Photobucket seems targeted at the masses who are just looking for a quick, simple, ad-hoc place to host photos for inclusion/use elsewhere. Photobucket is mostly useless to me, as I already pay for traditional web hosting. Photobucket offers me nothing that I don’t already have.
Flickr, on the other hand, offers interesting and valuable features that would require substantial effort on my part to duplicate.
I think the issue is with trying to compare multiple similar, but very different tools to determine “betterness”. It’s silly.
Correction.
Photobucket does offer me one thing: free/cheap bandwidth.
Thanks for your post Peter.
The techie and VC communities that are heavily invested in the Web 2.0 may always seem ignore non-Web 2.0 services. I think Photobucket’s success and apparent dominance as far as market share highlights the fact that many of the Web 2.0 services appeal to a fairly small audience. Photobucket appeals to the masses and while it may not have the sexy Web 2.0 functionality of services like Flickr, its simplicity and focus on providing the basic functionality that the average consumer wants are the exact reasons it’s so successful.
Readers should recall the Flickr vs. Zooomr fiasco that erupted recently here on Tech Crunch. It looks like these types of arguments may be of limited importance. You now have dozens of angel and VC funded Web 2.0 startups in the photo sharing space all looking to add the next killer feature that will blow the others out of the water when they’re really fighting for a limited market that may not be all that lucrative. All the Flickr-wannabes spending time and VC money on adding cool features that 0.1% of the Internet population care about is not the way to build a successful business.
I suspect basic services like Photobucket will continue to dominate the mainstream market and will have the best shot at finding a viable business model, while the dozens of latercomers like Zooomr competing for a small niche will serve as writeoffs for their investors come tax time.
I did forget that at the volume of videos uploaded that puts us at #3.
Myspace 70,000/day
Youtube 50,000/day
Photobucket 30,000/day
Although our use case for video is the true definition of user generated content. It’s your personal videos sharing with few friends or family, or if you have a very popular blog, or have a huge social network on another site, you might get a large viewership.
We allow video clips that are 3 min. Moments you share like your baby laughing, a friend falling, a funny skit you did, or a skateboard trick from the kids are typically under 1 min. If you want 5 min, we have that as a premium service
If you want to be part of a community with commenting, ranking and tagging, , Youtube and Myspace are perfect for that, like flickr they are more community focused.
Peter
Try this.
Search for word photobucke in craigslist
Query
Now search flickr
Photobucket returns 82,600 results
Flickr returns 886
Photobucket is the most popular website for listing on cragslist…have hardly seen anybody use flickr
As I’m not based in the US, can anyone tell me whether Flickr or Photobucket advertise outside of the online space and in more traditional print mediums?
Try this.
Search for word photobucket in craigslist
http://www.google.com/search?h.....tnG=Search
Now search flickr
http://www.google.com/search?h.....tnG=Search
Photobucket returns 82,600 results
Flickr returns 886
Photobucket is the most popular website for listing on cragslist…have hardly seen anybody use flickr
If I’m not mistaken, Flickr is a Photo only service, they frown upon users who use flickr as cheap/free hosting for pictures for other sites, where as photobucket is designed to do exactly that.
Surely flickr shouldn’t be knocked for not being something it never set out to be?
Paul B: Flickr doesn’t do any advertising online or off, and I don’t think Photobucket does either.
Andrew: see below:
Weird - was missing a closing quote in a link above the markup went crazy. Will report below. [Editors: please do me a favor and delete this with the broken one.]
[Note: I'm a co-founder of Flickr and act as its general manager inside of Yahoo!]
Two comments on this (most people will want to skip right to the numbers section, but it’s less relevant than comparing the products):
The products:
But when I think marketshare, I think direct alternatives (Toyota vs Honda or Google Search vs Yahoo! Search vs MSN Search).
I don’t really think of Photobucket as a competitor to Flickr. Though, as the Hitwise blogger says, “what they both do is enable people to share images online”, I’m not sure that that makes a “market”: They serve totally different purposes and I don’t think the people who use them would find either a replacement for the other. Photobucket is great at it’s job, and I humbly think Flickr is too
But even if we accept that there is such a market as “sites that enable people to share/host images online”, these would not be the right sites to include: MySpace itself allows photo uploads and is presumably bigger than Photobucket in serving their own users (as they are reportedly are for videos). Meanwhile, Facebook claims that it is the biggest photo sharing site on the internet. But I’d happily wager than Yahoo! Mail is by far the biggest “photo sharing” site of all in this way of thinking, and Hotmail would be close behind it.
But a list of photosharing sites by marketshare that went:
Yahoo! Mail
Hotmail
MySpace
MSN Spaces
Facebook
… etc.
would seem pretty weird
And, a different way of looking at it: if you drew a line from Flickr to Photobucket in the “conceptual space of internet products and services” and started extrapolating, that line would probably go to Akamai more than it would to mail or SNSs (and in a way, Photobucket is a consumer counterpart to Akamai’s enterprise service). But anyway …
The numbers:
The Hitwise stats are (a) US only and (b) (apparently?) counting entries in ISP’s proxy logs. So, this is not unique users, or pageviews, or even necessarily image serving traffic (a lot of requests for different infrequently-viewed images will cause more entries in the proxy logs than a smaller number of images each with massive traffic). If that’s how it works (and I actually don’t know) it seems more like they’re counting “marketshare” of lines in ISP proxy log files than any traditional understanding of marketshare.
For purposes of comparison:
Nielsen/NetRatings just announced US numbers for April which were significantly different. Summary (in thousands of unique users):
Photobucket: 7,838 (vs 5,419 a year ago for 45% growth)
Y! Photos: 7,772 (vs 6,439 a year ago for 21% growth)
Kodak: 7,633 (vs 6,508 a year ago for 17% growth)
Webshots: 6,070 (vs 6,070 a year ago for -15% growth)
Flickr: 4,816 (vs 1,080 a year ago for 346% growth)
Meanwhile, Comscore’s US numbers for May have been out for a while. For the sites mentioned by Hitwise (Hitwise didn’t include AOL Pictures, but if they had, they’d be in the middle of the pack on these two lists):
Y! Photos: 11,328 (vs 9,778 a year ago, for 16% growth)
Photobucket: 10,292 (vs 3,224 a year ago, for 217% growth)
Webshots: 8,478 (vs11,082 a year ago, for -23.5% growth)
Kodak: 7,431 (vs 5,625 a year ago, for 32.1% growth)
Flickr: 5,163 (vs 923 a year ago, for 459% growth)
Imageshack: 5,006 (vs 3,593 a year ago, for 39% growth)
SnapFish: 4,755 (N/A)
Shutterfly: 4,126 (vs 2,732 a year ago, for 51% growth)
PIcturetrail: 1,286 (vs 2,020 a year ago, for -36% growth)
Slide: 1,072 (N/A)
Comscore’s latest worldwide figures for all these sites only go to April:
Y! Photos: 30,736 (vs 27,217 a year ago, for 13% growth)
Imageshack: 23,862 (vs 12,448 a year ago, for 92% growth)
Webshots: 19,755 (vs 24,901 a year ago, for -21% growth)
Photobucket: 16,763 (vs 8,896 a year ago, for 88% growth)
Flickr: 16,516 (vs 3,423 a year ago, for 383% growth)
Kodak: 9,552 (vs 7,313 a year ago, for 31% growth)
SnapFish: 6,714 (N/A)
Shutterfly: 4,609 (vs 3,841 a year ago, for 20% growth)
PIcturetrail: 2,493 (vs 2,778 a year ago, for -10% growth)
Slide: 1,360 (N/A)
Photobucket says they have 18m users, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. So, Photobucket’s self-reported numbers are pretty close to Comscore’s (Comscore or any other reporting system is never going to be perfect - I have access to internal data for two of the properties on that list, so calibration is a little easier). Comscore’s numbers are fairly close for Flickr too (the ratios are off though: they seem to undercount Flickr’s US traffic and overcount the rest of the world).
Bottom line: NNR, Comscore, Alexa, Photobucket’s public statements and our internal data all roughly agree[1]. E.g., in unique users worldwide, Photobucket:Flickr is about to 1:1, while in the US the ratio is somewhere between 3:2 and 2:1 — as opposed to the 7:1 Hitwise reports.) Averaging them all out, Hitwise is definitely the outlier by a very wide margin. So, take it with a grain of salt.
[1] And other anecdotal facts align with these, like the number of incoming links to Photobucket and Flickr on Goolgle. Flickr with 260k and Photobucket with 218k.
Again - Alexa rankings are not to be taken seriously in this. Ask yoursefl, how many flickr / delicious user do you know who have an Alexa toolbar installed? (Do they finally have a firefox versoin out?)
How many people you think who fall for Myspace do have it installed?
The gist out of Alexa rankings for this is easy: Most _ALEXA_ users do not use Flickr but Photobucket.
As for the rankings - as far as I know, technorati does include myspace now. Does the photobucket service provide a little widget which includes a “by photobucket”?
Also, on myspace everything seem to reload everytime, including if you let open the site itself for longer.
It would probably a good idea to make a poll on techcrunch and ask for example how many use alexa on a regular basis, flickr, myspace or other services. I for example use IE only for checking page rank on Google and from time to time for alexa results - like once a month.
I expect a high percentage of Mac, then Firefox, then IE, a high percentage of flickr users etc.
And while the complete number may not be relevant, many readers of techchrunch are opinion leaders and influence those people using software.
So telling them “use photobucket for linking and flickr for your real photos ” will help both sites. 
I’m a Flickr user now. Always used ophoto before (because my wife stared using ophoto). I always hated ophoto because when ’sharing’ (emailing a link) from the site one must always ‘opt out’ of requiring a login. Most people forget to opt out, and it always bugs me as a user to be forced to login. I hate that! But, seems many users don’t mind this.
The main reason my wife will not use Flickr is because of her belief that you cannot order prints from it. In fact, you can. But, frankly, it’s not obvious. It’s the same with other non-techie family members - they really don’t get the community aspect of Flickr. Based on my limited sample, if Flickr made the commerce aspects more obvious, then perhaps they would get wider adoption.
I think its kind of apples and oranges here or maybe oranges and grapefruits (same family of fruit). I have used Photobucket for years and love it for its ease of submission and linking to for posts and such. I don’t find that flickr’s true purpose is the same as photobucket and therefore doesn’t quite do the job in the way that I would want it to for this. I believe its a decent app for posting photos where people will do the viewing right from the application itself. I’m not quite as attached to flickr, even for what I think its made for. I just haven’t used it long enough to grow to love it though.
Mike,
No given day would I translate blogosphere’s affinity to flickr to mass adoption. Just like you said, on TC, you have mentioned flickr 11 times or more. Does this mean that flickr is more popular than some other site X..Not necessarily..Of course, that doesnt take away any credit that the innovative folks at flickr are entitled to.
Well, anyways, I discussed this same issue with my mom (who, for her age is pretty net-savvy) and some other friends from non-tech-related-jobs. They obviously dont spend time reading TC
and hence are ignorant about tags, post photo to a blog etc..
For them, the main goal is a website to upload photos that they can send to their friends and family..that’s it…Period..
On the same note..These days, developers, designers, entrepreneurs etc are all busy getting rounded corners or big fonts or bright colors or groovy AJAX features to their site..In all of this, they seem to miss out on the big picture…What is the target audience..Are you targeting only the tech-savvy community that are regular readers of TC ? If not, you probably need to scale down your development budget a bit and spend more on marketing.
It would be interesting to do a survey of non-techie professionals and see how many of them are familiar with del.icio.us or slide or riya etc..
Unfortuntely the demographics of Alexa users are not representative. There are constantly new players with new ideas coming to the market like for example http://www.miaplaza.com and http://sossoon.net. Large corporations like NewsCorp or Yahoo are not well placed to keep up with grassroots developments. Players like KodakGallery, Snapfish or Smugmug are first generation online photo processors, competing with us http://fotoinsight.com and other pure photo services, but half heartedly adding online photo sharing. However, as they painfully worked out, the required resolution for photographic printing is not good for free online storing online.
Interesting stats, though the stats have to be used very carefully as each source has different measurement techniques and also the use base is not the same. It’s tough to make comparisons based on data from different sources, particularly when the swings in the very short run are so wide. If you need a more reliable answer, looks like Hitwise has a better handle.
Does anybody know what happens in the middle of April with the Alexa Rankings of a few Web 2.0 Service? They jumped all together up . You see it at the Flickr graph at the top or at this Link.
http://www.alexaholic.com/tech.....spiegel.de
“Try to figure out the percent of those MySpace profiles store their pics on Flickr vs. Photobucket. That would yield a much more accurate picture of which site is more popular as a photo storage site.”
Dumbest idea ever. A lot of people who use Flickr use it for it’s photo management tools. Not it’s photo hosting.
If I wanted to host just one profile pic, I would probably throw it up on photobucket. If I wanted to host the couple hundred photos I took with my camera, I’d upload it to Flickr (which I do regularly). They’re 2 different markets.
Its been written a million times, alexa demographic is skewed towards the tech people and poorly represents the mainstream internet users.
Hitwise stats are pretty accurate because the get the data directly from the many ISP’s ,even ranking.websearch.com data is accurate because they get the data from the funwebproducts spyware which is installed in almost 10% of the internet connected desktops.
I think that a big reason that people “talk” about Flickr more is because of the massive amount of external tools available for Flickr as compared to the other services.
Flickr’s photo API is one of the best I’ve seen and we’ve gone and made a Flickr desktop gadget ourselves ( http://www.uzable.com ) and it’s fairly popular. People talk about these tools on their blogs and this causes the “mentions” statistic to go out of scale when it comes to site popularity.
Again, there are a few commercial services out there, like say smugmug which offer a much more concrete offering (at least to the paying end consumer) that are quite simply ignored in these site popularity statistics.
I also pretty much agree with Stewart’s comment here. I don’t think that a comparison between Photobucket and Flickr is fair, really. I’d view Photobucket more as a free hotlinking picture site, and Flickr as more of a community around photos. One can’t really compare apples and oranges and still be fair, IMO.
in terms of ease of use, I use TinyPic which I think is part of Photobucket. I have a paid Flickr account but I find it easier to upload and link from Tinypic than to jump through the hoops to get pictures uploaded and linked from Flickr. Also, sometimes, you don’t want certain photos to be in your Flickr account because you only want to use it once. I think that’s Tinypic’s strength. Regarding Multiply, a lot of the people in my Multiply network only make their photos avaible within their community, I don’t know if Google can spider those photos.
Re Cameron’s post (No.16) he’s spot on in the difference between Flickr & photobucket is simply the storage/bandwidth offered by the latter for free. Having just been to a wedding and been a happy snapper with over 250+ photos to display, the flickr free bandwidth was soon gone whereas photobucket gulped the lot. Sure I could pay for FLICKR premium, but why bother.
i like photobucket
musk refill reevaluate reposing landlords rampant?antique,few!
Guys, I think Photobucket wins hands down, because it is easier to use. I have posted a comparison on my blog, Digital Dreams.Check it out and comment on it