There was a flurry of conversation last week about Hitwise’s blog entry report on use of web-based image management sites. The surprise was they claimed that PhotoBucket.com had about 44% of the photo-site market, ahead of Yahoo! Photos (18%) and Webshots Community (8.34%). Flickr was in sixth place with around 6%.
In the entry, LeeAnn Prescott discusses how one might have imagined Flickr to be higher on the list based on the amount of discussion around it.
What I found most interesting was the impact of MySpace:
Photobucket, Slide, and Imageshack are all image hosting sites, and MySpace is their primary source of traffic. In fact, MySpace was responsible for 76% of Slide’s traffic in May 2006, 56% of Photobucket’s traffic, and 50% of Imageshack’s traffic. The growth of Photobucket and Slide go hand in hand the growth of consumer generated content and social networking sites, as I’ve reported before. It’s amazing to consider that the 1.39% of the downstream traffic from MySpace that goes to Photobucket could be largely responsible for Photobucket’s category dominance. [LeeAnn Prescott – Hitwise US: PhotoBucket Leads Photo Sharing Sites; Flickr at #6]
In this context, I was also interested to come across the following note in Business Week Online:
In response to an audience question at the Supernova conference a few hours ago, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels revealed that a group of Amazon engineers is looking at ways to use Amazon Web services to bridge Amazon with Second Life. According to a comment by Vogels at the virtual-worlds blog 3pointD.com, it’s not an official project. But it’s no secret that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is an investor in Second Life creator Linden Lab, so I don’t doubt those engineers will come up with something. [Amazon.com May Get a Second Life]
MySpace and Second life aggregate demand: being in the ‘flow’ of their users increases use.
Related entries:
