PhotoBucket Rules
Photobucket, the plain vanilla photo hosting site is now officially the king of online photo business. It now has a whopping 44% of the total market, ahead of old timers – Yahoo, Webshots and Flickr. According to data collected by Hitwise, “its share of visits increased by 34% in the four months from February 2006 to May 2006.” Flickr is growing fast too – up 44% in the past four months.
Why is the company doing so well? Well a lot of MySpace users seem to love the company and host a lot of photos on that site. Amazing – success has nothing to do with Ajax, or cool stuff. It has everything to do with simplicity and giving users what they want.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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On the contrary, it does uses cool-stuff. The technology is powered by filmloop, which allows you to see the smooth scrolling. And the interesting thing is that filmloop is a pet project of Guy Kawasaki. His bets are paying off. Hats off to the man with the Art of the Start
The majority of people in the US don’t behave like the digital literati. Most don’t go shopping at Apple, Bergdorf, and Tiffany stores. They go to Walmart, HSN, and QVC. Most won’t use these new-fangled technologies that look so pretty. It’s not about pretty. I remember a great marketing professor I had from INSEAD who had the design guys come in from places like Proctor and Gamble. Against their deepest wishes they realized that they had to develop shampoo bottles that were ugly because ugly bottles sold better. People distrusted a product that looked too slick. Either it was expensive or all the work went into the bottle not the shampoo.
There are some new blog templates (see http://blogspottemplates.blogspot.com/) which can be customized with personal images. Most of these templates recommend the user to use photobucket to host the images. Hence, every time the blog is visited by a surfer, a request is made to photobucket to download the image.
So, if you are just looking at traffic hits, this will include a lot of pseudo-hits through blogs etc. Clearly, these hits are in no way an indication of the popularity or simplicity of photobucket.
I think the whole subject of unique-visitor/hit/popularity estimation of websites needs a thorough makeover. Alexa type ratings are already inaccurate and on top of that we have this kinda collateral spam.
More importantly, are they making any money?
I was going to post about the money, but Jacob beat me to it. Basically, I think that web 2.0 intelligensia have more money to spend online than MySpace people. Flickr being no. 6 just on people like me is actually pretty good.
Om,
I found this interesting too, particularly the prolific growth. I’m as surprised that Flickr has less than 6% market share as I am of Photobucket’s dominance.
One thing Hitwise’s research doesn’t consider, and I think it’s important relative to the long-term success in this market, is all of these sites respective business models and profitability. I have no idea whether any of these sites are doing a great job of matching escalating infrastructure/bandwidth costs with their revenue model, but I sure would love some perspective on that matter.
Best,
Jason
It’s interesting to look at the Alexa numbers for these sites: http://www.alexaholic.com/photobucket.com flickr.com webshots.com kodakgallery.com imageshack.com
Flickr’s in the lead.
It seems Flickr might be aimed at people who are more serious about photography and command more views per image. Or it might be that less people to go the Photobucket site since they’re posted on MySpace. Or maybe Alexa toolbar users just disproportionately like Flickr.
It’s too bad we don’t have something like Alexa to measure dollars spent. Then we’d know who really has the market share. Perhaps we need PayPala, AMEXa, MasterCarda to get those stats.
We actually are not powered by filmloop, the contrary, we power most of the filmloops out there. We have been around for 3 years, serving now 18 million users, and yes we have myspace users, but we also have users to over 60,000 unique websites. Photobucket was one of the first to empower users to take their content where they want thru the simple process of uploading to us, and direct linking.
We currently upload over 5 million new images, and that’s all types, photos, animated gif’s, screenshots, etc. and we do video with currently over 30,000 uploads a day.
We are not a photo community like flickr and don’t do tagging, of which we believe they do a great job at. We are more about hosting your visual content in 1 location and providing a fast, reliable service for you to express yourself wherever you want.
Thanks for the writeup, since we aren’t a web 2.0 company, I guess we don’t get the silicon valley love ;)
I’d be happy to talk to anyone about Photobucket.
peter@photobucket.com
Cheers!
Peter
What should determine if a photo sharing company is making it or not? Unique visitors? Site hits? Alexa ranking? Number of users? Number of hosted photos? Bottom line revenue?
Or all of the above?
:)
Om,
2 thoughts:
I put my thoughts on the numbers here:
http://fuzzyblog.com/archives/2006/06/22/hitwise-versus-alexa-and-flickr-versus-photobucket/
Simplicity and giving users what they want. Brilliantly said. Thank you for reminding all of us, so succinctly, why we all build startups. Its not for the Ajax.
Scott