Flickr #1 Photography Site in UK
Flickr has taken
the #1 spot in our Photography category and it seems
to be down to good SEO (search engine optimisation)
for soft porn searches. I'll admit it was a bit of
a surprise last week when I looked at our Photography
category and noticed that Flickr had moved into the
#1 spot. The last time I'd looked at this was in
the Spring, when Flickr ranked behind Photobucket and Community
Webshots.
In the week to 17th June 2006, Flickr became the
#1 website based on share of UK visits in the Hitwise -
Photography category. 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.
SEO and Soft Porn
A quick analysis of Flickr's clickstream and search terms led me to the conclusion
that Flickr has grown through good SEO and specifically searches for soft-porn.
Flickr received 33% of its visits from search engines last week, compared to
13% and 28% respectively for Photobucket and Community Webshots.
Whilst
there were 3,597 unique search terms sending visits
to Flickr in the past four weeks, there were
only 651 for Photobucket and 1,475 for Community
Webshots. 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). Not only are there more terms
sending visits to Flickr, but the brand name terms
account for a smaller share of the site's visits.
Whilst the term "flickr" accounted for 9.47% of site
visits for Flickr.com in the past four weeks, the
term "photobucket" accounted for 47.03% of visits
to Photobucket.com. There are a handful of soft-porn
terms sending visits to Community Webshots, but not
nearly the volume as for Flickr.
The MySpace Effect
You may be wondering why this is so different in the UK and the US. LeeAnn (our
Director of Research in the US) did a post in June showing that Photobucket
ranked #1 in the US whilst Flickr came in at #6. She found that MySpace was
a huge source of visits for Photobucket in the US, as it is 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. In
the UK, MySpace ranked #12 last week behind Bebo at #10.
Bebo users appear to be less attached to Photobucket.
Last week, 0.35% of downstream visits from Bebo went
to websites in the Entertainment - Photography category,
compared to 2.06% from MySpace. As mentioned above,
22% of Photobucket's visits came from MySpace, compared
to 0.98% from Bebo.
I have been promising a few of you a post comparing
adoption of Web 2.0 sites in the UK versus the US.
Stay tuned - more to come on that in the coming weeks.
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