Hitwise UK is a great site for keeping track of global as well as UK web trends. They have just posted about Yahoo! Flickr once again becoming #1 website, in the Hitwise Photography category, based on share of UK visits.
It seems softporn search queries has something to do with the sudden rise in Flickr traffic?
“In the past three months, whilst Flickr’s market share of UK visits has increased 39%, Photobucket’s has decreased 17% and Community Webshot’s has remained flat.” said Heather Hopkins, VP of Research for Hitwise UK . “The top terms sending visits to Flickr are searches for the brand (“flickr”, “flickr.com” and “flicker”) and soft porn terms (“boobs”, “transvestite” and “nudity” to name a few tame terms)”.
According to LeeAnn (Hitwise Director of Research in the US) in the US Photobucket is ranked #1 whilst Flickr came in at #6. So why is this so different in the UK. It seems MySpace was a huge effect on the number of visits for Photobucket in the US, as it does in the UK. “MySpace accounted for 22% of Photobucket’s upstream UK visits last week, compared to only 1.45% for Flickr” but the MySpace effect is much more important in the US than in the UK.
MySpace recently became the #1 ranked website in the US, based on share of US visits and therefore pulls through many of its ecosystem partners, yet in the UK, MySpace ranked #12 last week behind Bebo at #10.
On a separate point, although my Yahoo! ID is the same for both Yahoo! Photos and Flickr, I cannot still seamlessly import/export my photos from one service to the other?
Why would I want to do that? The reason is because all of my photos are in Flickr but it still lacks an online UK photo development partner(s) and yet Yahoo UK & Ireland photos does have an online UK photo function? I guess printing out digital photos must be very 20th century these days ;-)