If Facebook has one standout application it has to be Photos. Measured on its own, it is the largest photo site on the Web. A full 69 percent of Facebook’s monthly visitors worldwide either look at or upload photos, based on comScore data. And more than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to the site.
And it’s been pulling away from its competitors. As can be seen in the comScore chart above, as recently as last September the top three photo sites in the U.S. were running neck-and-neck, with Facebook Photos at 23.9 million unique visitors, followed by Photobucket at 21.3 million uniques, and Flickr at 19.5 million uniques. But by January, the number of monthly U.S. visitors going to Facebook Photos shot up 41 percent to 33.6 million. Meanwhile, Photobucket is up only 7 percent to 22.8 million, while Flickr is up 12 percent to 21.9 million. (Picasa is a distant fourth in the U.S. with 8.1 million).
In other words, Facebook increased the gap between its closest competitor (Photobucket in the U.S.) from 2.6 million monthly unique visitors to 10.8 million. On a worldwide basis, the gap between Facebook Photos and Flickr (which is the No. 2 site globally, and looks like it is about to pass Photobucket in the U.S.) went from 41.2 million unique monthly visitors in September to 87 million in December (the most recent data available, see chart below).
What accounts for Facebook’s advantage in the photo department? The biggest factor is simply that it is the default photo feature of the largest social network in the world. And of all the viral loops that Facebook benefits from, its Photos app might have the largest viral loop of all built into it. Whenever one of your friends tags a photo with your name, you get an email. This single feature turns a solitary chore—tagging and organizing photos—into a powerful form of communication that connects people through activities they’ve done in the past in an immediate, visual way. I would not be surprised if people click back through to Facebook from those photo notifications at a higher rate than from any other notification, including private messages.
But the tagging feature has been part of Facebook Photos for a long time. What happened in September to accelerate growth? That is when a Facebook redesign went into effect which added a Photos tab on everyone’s personal homepage.
(The chart above shows U.S. visitors through January. The chart below shows international visitors through December, with 153.3 million unique visitors for Facebook Photos, 66.7 million for Flickr, 45.5 million for Picasa and 42.7 million for Photobucket).
I would not recommend using facebook as your primary source for photo hosting. Facebook’s compression or algorithms for minimizing the photo are horrific. They completely destroy the quality of your image. It’s fun to have the ability to share them with you friends but if you’re serious about preserving your pictures I would stick with a stand-alone hosting site, my preference is Picasa in google.
You can put as many photos as you want on your own Blog or website and not have to deal with Facebook’s T’s and C’s. Additionally, the Internet itself is a Social Network, and your Blog or website is your profile. I wish we would stop living within the boundaries that Facebook, MySpace etc want us too. Those websites do have their positives, like protecting your Brand name and than redirecting to your main group of websites, as well as the free exposure to new potential clients and friends.
As we more forward the lines between Media and Social Media will become blurred, as the dinosaur Media sources of the world embrace the power of the Internet more so and all of the tools/applications/widgets that come along with it.
These are some super exciting times we live in and I’m very happy to be alive.
like your philosophy. the playing field has never been so level. we are at an apex of innovation. open social will obliterate myspac and FazeBk. as users mature they will position themselves on strategic niche professional social channels. playing games on fadbk and mspac will only last so long and then it will be time to get back to work and being truly productive.
CareersLocator.com – enslave yourself
It depends on the user.
If you’re a professional photographer seeking visibility, Flickr or a photo commerce site is appropriate.
If you’re a blogger seeking publicity, Flickr and Picasa works great.
If you’re looking to share with family and friends, Facebook does the job.
I just wished that Facebook would open their database so that users in Facebook who wish to share photos more publicly can do so. Then, we can integrate photokit with Facebook. Pls see http://bf.tearn.com/ family of conversation-starter websites.
Also http://gf.tearn.com/ for the guys.
http://tv.tearn.com/ for the tv-holics seeking to integrate their tv experience with web chat
Woosh.
You miss the point – facebook is maliciously engineered. Gives more data and useful content to google than to its own users. They want you to hand over more and more data to them to get anything back, they see more connections as money, pure and simple.
Flickr is better my friend
try to use http://www.esnips.com – it’s the best upload and share site with 5G of storage for free
Picasa resizing and compression is awful. A hair above Facebook, maybe, but just a hair.
Looks like that redesign that so many people hated at first worked out well for Facebook in the end. Just shows the power of real usability testing, I suppose.
Does revenue breakout per service mean anything in this context? I know that Flickr has premium accounts, and that Facebook incurs costs to host this free, value added service to its offering.
Is Flickr a net revenue generator for Yahoo? I do believe that other standalone photo sites are profitable.
Great, Facebook pulls ahead in the race for who can lose the most money the fastest!
Facebook faces massive server, storage and bandwidth costs for photos. 10 billion photos is nothing to laugh at in terms of impact on costs.
How will Facebook ever make money from these photos?
Oh, I know, they can try to take ownership of all of them and then resell them to anyone else … if they bury this clause in fine print in their TOS which no one reads anyways, no one will notice.
Anjalie Sen
Ohh common ….. i see you only have 6 friends in FB. What are you complaining about when you dont even use the service and understand i ? you live in a country where FB is not localized, just stick to Orkut for now.
Is it really that hard for you?
1. Signed up for account.
2. Read terms of service.
3. Stopped using service immediately.
I’d much rather have ownership of my own writings and photos, and fight for my rights, thank you.
Anjali Sen
Anjali –
The pic feature makes FB incredibly sticky… resulting in more frequent visits, longer engagement etc.
Also, the cost of switching to another SN site goes up (ask those who still have earthlink.net and aol.com email accounts).
It’s not always about monetization. It is about user acquisition, engagement and retention too. The cost of storing photos is not high. Bandwidth may or may not be an issue.
Speaking of monetization – FB is incredibly under-monetized. I’m pretty sure they will figure out ways to correct this.
Finally, FB is not the loser when it doesn’t have Anjali Sen. Anjali Sen is. But that is my opinion. Thank you.
Think for a sec. Facebook is able to offer free photo service for it users and now they are on the top right now. Yes it is a low quality. But think, when Facebook decided to offer paid service for their photos, take a guess how successful they will be. Very successful because they already have the user base. It is just a matter of time.
Yea, trash facebook all you want, when they start making money, they will explode.
Take SmugMug for example. They’re super profitable and in my opinion surprinsingly not well-known. I think of them as the premier photo-hosting/sharing site.
I love SmugMug… they don’t mess with your photos… so you upload high quality and that’s what you’ll see online.
http://photos.o...photography.com – that’s my smugmug site.
Funny, after their TOS change I deleted all my photo albums in protest.
Still wish Yahoo hadn’t killed their classic photo site/service. It was dead simple to view – very easy to send someone like my mom there without an account and without having to learn anything.
That’ll teach them.
Yep, photos are the winning ticket of Facebook, it does it better than most other web sites, even stand-alone hosting. The quality might be poor, but they download quickly & that’s what we want. If you still want quality then pay for it. .
facebook will dominate many categories due to their size of audience. Marc Andreesen said it on Charlie Rose – Facebook could turn the revenue hose on at anytime. I think this proves that. The audience size is to big.
btw: I got to this link from Mike Arrington – thought he was off the grid – yet Erik you wrote this post.
Is twitter not really Mike?
Mike’s Twitter is updated by Twitterfeed, which updates @techcrunch when it reads the RSS feed and finds a new post.
Just because Andreesen pontificates, does not automatically create a truth. Sure, he is a luminary, but the foundational issues surrounding Facebook’s ability to become a profitable on-line service (in this economy) are not decided at all.
That’s just why any website should not depend their traffic on other websites.
People use Photobucket, Flickr and Picasa for their Facebook Profiles and other social media accounts.
I wonder what will happen to Photobucket, Flickr and Picasa. They should also create their own social media network allowing users to create social accounts just like facebook.
Incredible!
Flickr for me is much much better, but ever since solutions like Ginipic keep popping up, it’s becoming more attractive to browse albums in Facebook as well.
Does anyone know of any other apps that allow you to view the albums without being in Facebook?
No surprise there. Facebook is an easy way to share photos with people that you consider “friends”. Keep in mind the whole TOS issues since its coming and everyone knows it. If there are photos out there online, keep in mind that those photos are being replicated and ultimately, you’re gonna loose control of ownership so if you don’t wont to loose control, don’t put it out there.
They must be making a ton of money hosting all those photos.
rofl
If only you could see higher quality versions instead of the resized ones…
Still use Flickr, there is definetly room for a standalone photo site(s) however Facebook’s photo app will apply pressure to some of the smaller sites I think.
facebook destroys your images. Their compression code is horrible. It’s good to see your friends faces, but if you want to share a half decent photo forget about it.
Does Facebook own your images? Can they mine them for ad data? Since yo are tagging them, they can make a lot of interesting ad decsions.
Your pick — stick with Facebook and watch your privacy and media slip away.
Didn’t the recent attempt to nationalization your privacy teach you guys anything?
They are going to Obama your ass (or your photos at least). TRUST NO ONE.
Jeez….how many facebook post can you have in a day. Techcrunch is like a walking billboard for Facebook and Twtitter. It pays I guess to have PR dept’s that pull your strings.
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Flickr is better, but Facebook wins anyway {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/qxR17JVIwV_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Flickr is better, but Facebook wins anyway ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/h3ygVipda7″}}}
I still prefer Flickr because of the photo community around it.
It’s a powerhouse but in this game you are rarely on top for too long once you start “going green” in the financial sense.
I guess his “could make a billion tomorrow” scheme would be to charge a dollar a month per user to stay on facebook. In order to hold off any new competitor they’d need to solidify their user base entirely though-which appears to be the current stage. Facebook still seems to have the least “predator” issues publically mentioned, greater data security, etc. I use justaskgemalto for all my digital security advice.
Facebook has captured my wife but I refuse to relent. It’s just one big AOL chat room from the 90s as best I can determine. I’m so over chat.
Imagine …
When you’re walking down the street or in a shopping mall and out of nowhere you hear an electronic voice saying your name it will be because FB used those photos to recognize you.
FB won’t sell your photos like Corbis does, but the new TOS will allow them to sell the data so you can be recognized. I’m just guessing of course but could this be what they have in store?
I’ll just say one word about that idea that Facial metadata can be serialized and shipped:
eigenfaces.
The NSA/CIA thanks you in advance. That schmuck Obama has cut our funding — so this helps a lot.
That’s just more money and more problems for FB! Not good when it keeps costing you more and more to host!
I always felt flickr had to go more the direction of deviantart – not that more casual users couldn’t post there, but that it needs to sell its community as one of serious artists, because there are quite a few of them there.
I go to flickr to stumble and digg photos I think have merit. I never have promoted a photo I’ve seen on Facebook, not even within Facebook.
Facebook will always have this “lead,” but it is a dubious distinction, given that many of us know 90% of the photos on Facebook are beyond redundant.
I was thinking about this the other day. What if Facebook’s most used features could be replicated by more nimble competitors that just do one thing really well, such as Twitter has done for status updates? I think if a site could do for Facebook Photos what Twitter has done for the status update (i.e. make it dead simple and innovate around it) it could be successful if done right.
I think that is the threat to Facebook: too make each of Facebook’s features individual components and then execute them really well.
The big thing is the intent: photos are just one of different elements that people are putting up on FB to connect with their community. Since the photo sharing sites started, the technology of storage and compression has improved dramatically. You don’t need a remote site for storage; you want it primarily for sharing. Facebook takes all the effort out of sharing: tag a face and away you go.
I love the way Facebook uses and is able to distribute pictures. What I HATE (hate, hate, hate) is the quality. I take professional pictures as a hobby, and Facebook destroys them in the compression. Even if you upload using their limitations, it still gets compressed. It’s ridiculous.
I wish the biggest photo sharing site in the world would also have some quality behind it. But when did the big gorilla ever take advice from the minority?
Maybe you shouldn’t be using a stupid social site to display your “professional” pictures?
Here’s my approach to online photo-sharing:
The few decent photos I manage to take I share with complete strangers on Flickr.
When it comes to sharing photos with people I know, have once been associated with or have at one point or another considered acquaintances of mine, then I post them to Facebook.
For real friends and family I use SmugMug.
I prefer to use picasa to host my images, coz it owned by google and i believe has strong servers.
Most probably have images on several services. It seems like this is mostly an effect of Facebook’s overall traffic rather than it’s photo services being a superior offering.
Quality of the photos are diminished after uploading them to facebook but rest of the features are great, I will keep using FB, I can see they are paying more attention to the photos so it may improved with the passage of the time.
Having pictures stored on most image repository sites is the equivalent of having them in a filing cabinet. For most people pictures are part of their life and worth sharing. Facebook is about sharing, tagging, commenting with your friends – its infinitely more fun than browsing through flickr. Most people couldnt care less about ‘compression algorithms’ and rights issues over family snaps.
I would say the iPhoto upload to Facebook feature really helped this too. It goes with the time line and makes uploaded photos to Facebook insanely simple.
Yet again the author of this post fails to bring up something material to the article. In this case he doesn’t even reference the Facebook TOS debacle that occurred only last week and how this might impact future numbers (clearly stating it as a speculation unlike asserting a wild rumor or speculation as a fact like in his last.fm article).
In addition the author fails to cite any evidence to support why Facebook is pulling away from the pack. He is probably basing it on his own opinion. Why does he not state it clearly as his opinion or gut feeling? Don’t try to do an opinion piece by masquerading it as a trend piece based on real evidence if the meat of the post is about the author’s opinion:
“The biggest factor is simply that it is the default photo feature of the largest social network in the world.” <— Where is the evidence?
If it isn’t just opinion, where are you data sources supporting your argument for the meat of the article? And exactly what do they tell us? It is probably true, that is what my gut tells me too, but I have no data to back up my findings. Does Erick Schonfeld?
Zuckerberg talked about this at F8. Unfortunately, Facebook knows that their photos service lacks key features and they don’t really seem to care. “The power of the social graph,” blah blah more popular than competitors with better features quack quack… It’s really a shame. I love the way FB lets my real friends see my photos. But I wish it supported higher res, freeform tagging, basically all the stuff that makes Flickr great. Boo.
This is almost like comparing SLR’s to point ‘n shoots. Facebook is the undisputed repository for camera phone pictures and other compact cameras. Anyone that actually cares about their photos is going to use one of those other sites like Flickr, photobucket, smugmug, etc.
How will Facebook ever make money from these photos?
lol , 10 billion photos
Most of my relatives use Facebook to share “some” snapshots of special occasions. But mainly, I’ve setup a network family sites to store/share photos – privately using Gallery, the open source web based photo album organizer.