Photobucket vs. Flickr in Alexa and Technorati

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.