The most used camera among Flickr users is the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, according to new statistics tracking camera usage released by the company.
Flickr determines the most popular cameras based on data automatically included with most digital cameras today. The most popular “point and shoot” camera is the Canon Powershot SD400, and camera phone is the Sony Ericsson K750i.
I agree with Paul Kedrosky – this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cool data that web services can collect and give back (or sell back) to the community. Paul even thinks soon we’ll see companies that make more revenue from ancillary data than from the services themselves.
I’m looking forward to seeing how we can leverage all the great geotagging data that Flickr’s been collecting these last few months, too.
i’d be interested in seeing how many users shoot with each camera, as opposed to how many photos are produced by each camera.
I agree, I’d like to see the data sliced that way as well.
Michael what’s with that stretched Flickr logo? It just looks bad.
# Can Flickr restrict this analysis on what data they have and not make changes to the process in the drive to collect more data – this might just push away users
# If this becomes a trend and is extended to other areas data privacy might soon become a concern
# Great piece of information – current data is highly relevant for the users probably – Is it of any use at all to the manufacturers ?
How timely you mention the geotagging too, as of 9 minutes ago we just passed 10 Million geotagged photos, now at …
10,000,306 in total (7,428,836 public)
http://geoblogg...otagged-photos/
If they use the geotagging data with the most popular cameras they could compile regional use of cameras quite easily. I’d like to see that.
Thanks, the analysis might serve in making a decision to buy a digital cam for me:).
“# Can Flickr restrict this analysis on what data they have and not make changes to the process in the drive to collect more data – this might just push away users”
the data that generates this list is pulled from exif information.
you can:
1] not include EXIF information in the files you upload to flickr
2] use the flickr setting to hide exif information on this page: http://www.flic.../prefs/privacy/
so i really don’t think privacy is at all an issue here and it shouldn’t push people away since providing the information to flickr is entirely optional with multiple way of hiding the data.
Interesting… Combining Chris’s and Raghu’s points, while the stats released now and other large-scale trends are not a problem for privacy, the clear motivation and apparent ability to drill down to more “local” and “focal” data is definitely a thing where drawing the line might become difficult. But, it will probably be just buried in those terms of use -litanies nobody reads anyway…
Raw data is rarely useful for users, manufacturers or retailers, but when processed and cross-tabbed with something else might become very interesting indeed: how about make and model of camera vs. the ratings of the pictures or number of time viewed; or the above-mentioned geographical distribution of camera makes or types (phone cam, point/shoot, system)? Combined with the demographic etc. info that both the websites and the manufacturers have of their clientele, I see loads of potential for these stats as marketing tool – the other question is whether the users want all that profiling to be going on, and are they happy to provide their details to the pool.
Just as I posted earlier today, I think if Flickr showed the cams that were the favorite as their top header choice, that would be better.
http://www.cent...market-research
I do think this is a great use of data – and in this case, rather than charging for it, they are making a spiff when someone buys thru Yahoo shopping. I call it Genius 2.0.
Flickr’s Geotagging fuction is great – if not a little time consuming at times – but it would be great to see cheap ’smart’ cameras with optional geotagging capability designed in ( kick me if I’m wrong but the most popular models quoted above dont ship with this feature ) as this data is just so useful for determining where people are at….and where they are at in ways far beyond the obvious.
Imagine the ability to geolocate and map certain facial characteristics or distribution of dog breeds or , a little down down the line, the ability to globally analyse the physical ageing process of a whole generation as never before.
Simply relying on people to take the time to geotag their photos on Flickr or Zoomr isnt the solution , we need cameras that know where they are at.
Desik: We’ll start to see GPS in cameras fairly soon, the chips are getting smaller and cheaper and production has been steadily ramping up for a while now.
Probably in the cheaper cameras first too. In a world where it’s getting harder for the point and click cameras to differentiate themselves from each other, mega pixels doesn’t seem to cut it with the consumer any more, things like wi-fi, publish from camera to web and GPS will start cropping up more and more.
Especially when you have sites like Flickr, Smugmug and Zoomr raising consumers interest in the topic and putting pressure on camera manufactures to provide.
striatic,
Thanks for your inputs on how users have a choice to avoid sharing the information being used at Flickr. Not that I worry so much about somebody else knowing which camera I use – but may definitely may not want to reveal something else, so an option for me to control outflow of information is a must.
TH,
Fully agree with you that at a aggregate level nobody has any problem at all, but things become a little hazy of what is sharable and what is not when you drill a little deeper !
And yes the business options of a possibility like this are interesting to imagine, some possibilities
a. This reverse flow of information to the manufacturers can help them design their marketing campaigns – they can even customize it based on geographies
b. Based on the usage patterns over periods of time shops can design discount approaches
c. If Flickr monetizes the information they collect from me – can I get something in return if I agree to share the information with them.
… keep adding folks
This is purely market research data and flickr knows it. Manufacturers and marketers will pay for this data. And flick can leverage the data to open doors and forge new partnerships. Smart.
I remember there being a website which extracted flickr pictures camera names by the popularity of the pictures and not by “how many”. I forget the website name though.
But that would put much more value into it I think…
Canon EOS Rebel XT… The Ford Taurus of digital cameras. Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s good.
this is the kind of stuff my site can pull but we see really little interest in it from companies, honestly.
http://www.nyti...ml?ref=business
An excellent article on FreshDirect in today’s NY Times. See the end for how they leverage customer data in ways bricks & mortar do not.
There are extensive uses for consumer based data. Why exactly do you think there are 12 types of mustard? Or back to topic why are there so many types of cameras?
In data mining you look for overall trending, historical, geographic etc. as it realates to the product and its feature sets.
I know its very hard for people who operate advertising based websites and portals to grasp that sometimes (most of the time) there is significantly more money in the long term in a real product like aggregated data, coupled with good analysis.
The value of the data is not so much in historical trending (althouth it is valuable for performance measurements) but in predictive modeling
Sorry my post got cut off…
@ Patricia
The reason your company sees little interest is because the retial industry, marketing were the initial drivers for data mining consumer based information, therefore they have a large historical repository to draw from.
Which does not mean you should’nt be collecting as much data as possible about your users (both passive data and opt-in data they volunteer), what it means is you need a good analyst to show you what to do with it to help optimize your business.
@Raghu
“c. If Flickr monetizes the information they collect from me – can I get something in return if I agree to share the information with them.”
Why should you get a piece of thier pie as a consumer of thier site, what I mean is your already using a free service, the usage data and both passive and active data belong to them.
Shouldnt your contribution as a community member and the fact that your contributing to making a product (that you use) better be enough of a return?
Every major multinational industry mines consumer data, some better than others, and some not at all. This is the data that ultimately defines what products you see, what people will pay, and subsequently defines advertising further down stream. Yes the advertisng engine makes more money as an industry, but it does not run without gas…..
The wonderful thing about Google, that is often forgotten, is that Larry and Sergy were data geeks and constructing an algorithim to spider the net was a means of achieveing this data.
The point that everyone missed last time around (except a very few) was that its not about eyeballs, its about value add data aquisition, and information, which subsequrntly drives the advertising.
In the brick and mortar world, the mechandise and advertising drive the data. On the web this relationship is completely reversed.
Only lemmings think otherwise.
This is the ultimate revenge for us math geeks
It is a very interesting post, I did a follow up on the camera phone aspect
http://almanazi...akes_the_m.html
Michael,
Thanks for pointing this out! You could spend hours mining this data as I’m sure some of the digital camera vendors will be doing over their leftovers this weekend.
It really shows the skew of the demographics of Flickr to the advanced amateur and photo hobbyists. It also shows Canon’s dominant position in this segment.
Even though Kodak and SONY are top selling consumer DC brands, they are very under represented in the universe of Flickr photos. SONY has only two models with over 1 million photos, Kodak does not have any, their top model has 695K photos. Compare that to Nikon, with 8 models (not just dSLRs) with more that 695K photos and Canon has 33 models with more than 695K photos!
Some other interesting numbers:
Total Number of Photos (from Flickr’s data):
Canon 75 Million
Nikon 26 Million
SONY 22 Million
Olympus 13.9 Million
Kodak 10.6 Million
Happy Thanksgiving!
Myron
http://camera.mashupslive.com is a similar website with much less statistics but with samples for each camera.
Since you asked about geotagged pictures, I want to let you know that we’re doing that right now. When a new place is saved on Rrove (http://www.rrove.com), we automatically pull the images off Flickr and add that to a dedicated page we create. If you look further, we also add other information – Googlemaps satellite view, Wikipedia articles (if any) and EVDB events.
Examples here:
http://www.rrov...11103/st.-peter’s-basilica
http://www.rrov...11094/colosseum
So hows that for layers auto-created info on user-generated content?
related to my earlier comment, they seem to be breaking down the numbers by % of users now .. or maybe they were before but are making it more clear now.
You can find the most popular cameras in there.
http://fashiond...ital.weblog.com
http://digital-...s.blogspot.com/