How's Flickr doing? Pretty well! |
I saw some usage numbers which looked good for Flickr this morning: 50 million active users. I was curious to see what I could find to back that up. As of April 2015, here's what I find:
- Over 16 million active users per month, U.S. alone (growing since mid-2013): http://www.statista.com/statistics/252566/number-of-unique-us-visitors-to-flickrcom/
- Flickr users upload 3.5 million photos to the site each day. http://www.iacpsocialmedia.org/Resources/FunFacts.aspx#sthash.uixjr2eL.dpuf
- Now 92 million total registered users: http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/resource-how-many-people-use-the-top-social-media/6/
The 50 million active users seems plausible given the U.S. visitor and daily upload figures, and given the U.S. user graph, the trend is solidly up over the last 2 years. I have over 4000 photos there and contribute more just about every day that I have Internet access, so it's good to see that they're doing well.
Why is Flickr growing? Even after 10 years it had feature advantages over many other sites, with strong tagging, group functionality, strong search capability with and the ability to sort by "interestingness". Given those features, here are some of the things that I've found the site to be good for over the past 10 years:
- Seeing amazing pictures
- Getting inspired by those pictures to travel new places
- Reading and posting techniques tips. People can come here and become a better photographer.
- Getting feedback on my photos, usually positive, sometimes constructive.
- Interacting with people about photos and the places they depict.
- Meeting other photographers and shooting with them.
- Searching for the best photos from a place, the most interesting viewpoints, before I visit there.
- Making some money from Getty and from direct contact by image buyers has helped fund both gear and travel: my continued development as a photographer.
Flickr has been very good at attaching valuable context to photos/content: map location, tags, inclusion in thematic groups, and that can all be searched against. In addition it has been very good at introducing me to other avid photographers and quality work from them, and it's fantastic that we haven't been inundated with images from everyone with a mobile phone camera and their cats. While counting total users is a game that industry pundits may use to have something to talk about to compare one site to another, but it's a fairly meaningless comparison, like comparing apples to broccoli and potatoes. If you want to connect with fellow avid photographers, it's not particularly useful to have 10X or 50X more general users on a social media site.
So while the social aspect of interacting with others around photos has been a key to Flickr delivering value, that's valuable to the extent that it supports a photographer's aspirations to be out shooting more, shoot in more stunning places, to be a better photographer, and to connect with other like-minded people. Over the past year Flickr has been busy working on an image licensing system, so earning money for your photography could soon become a reason to spend more time on Flickr as well.
So while the social aspect of interacting with others around photos has been a key to Flickr delivering value, that's valuable to the extent that it supports a photographer's aspirations to be out shooting more, shoot in more stunning places, to be a better photographer, and to connect with other like-minded people. Over the past year Flickr has been busy working on an image licensing system, so earning money for your photography could soon become a reason to spend more time on Flickr as well.
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