How's Flickr Doing These Days?

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.

On Flickr, photographers interact around the content, so pursuing producing quality photographs is inherently recognized as participating in and contributing to the community.  If you like photography, if you want to learn more, if you want to share and discuss your results with like-minded people, Flickr is a site where you can find an incredible diversity of photographers and knowledge.  So Flickr enables social interaction around photography as well as or better than than many sites called "social".   Being focused around photography, Flickr doesn't attract volumes of people simply looking for a place to become "Internet famous".  And taking this narrower target audience seriously, Flickr actually does something about copyright violators who steal our work.  Often someone tells me that someone has take my image and re-uploaded it, by the time I get that message and go look, the offending account is already shut down.  Social media sites seeking high transaction numbers thrive on photo theft, and rarely will delete any more than the one image you own and are reporting, often leaving hundreds of obvious infringements active, rewarding the person who stole them.  Some of the people stealing photos and presenting them as if they were their own are posing as professional photographers.  Some social media sites shelter and even promote these faux-tographers if they're driving enough precious "interaction".  It's a huge plus for photographers on Flickr that Yahoo! maintains higher ethical standards than that.  Hollow click-trading statistics are like Monopoly money.  Some people get caught up collecting them, and sites even try to compete to some degree on that basis, but it's not the same as lasting value.  Those games get old fast for most people, and the people who get caught up most in them tend to get rather aggressive towards other photographers.  Flickr doesn't provide as many tools for pure social interaction without photos, but that excludes the anti-social use of those tools as well.  

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. 

Keep your Wordpress Content Fresh With Your Social Media Content

Social media is where a lot of the "action" is these days... new content and interaction (reshares, views, comments, likes, favorites). But posts on social media don't necessarily get seen, in part because your subscribers may not be watching at that moment, and because sites like Facebook and Google+ now filter content by what they predict people want to see, so many or most of your subscribers may never be presented with your content that they subscribed to see.  Social media posts can have a short half-life, getting buried quickly behind other content, so interaction falls off quickly.

Blogs offer a more rich publishing platform and people subscribe to see their content.  Many sponsors are accustomed to rating online influence by monthly traffic to a blog. So while some people have found success becoming "Internet famous" and are sponsored simply to post on social media, other corporate sponsors haven't broadened their criteria beyond more lasting content delivery platforms like +WordPress and +Blogger.

One of the ways they evaluate your content is using +Google Analytics to measure monthly visits to your blog.  So even if you've been  somewhat successful marketing though content, engagement and building a following on social media, you may find that the sponsors you'd like to connect with are using other metrics to evaluate potential marketing partners.

Posting to blogs adds yet another location to post to, and it is a good idea to have unique content there utilizing the added features such as the ability to include multiple images. But all of your work on social media doesn't have to go go waste.  To some degree your audience varies from site to site on social media, and who is online looking at your posts varies, so allowing your social media posts to aggregate to a blog can give your friends and followers a single place to see your recent content.  If you do a good job curating the site and attracting people to come back over time, your potential sponsor will like it as well.

I had a nice experience with the Google+ to Wordpress plugin for Wordpress this morning.  The founder of photo sharing site +500px, +Evgeny Tchebotarev, tweeted to his 5000+ followers one of my Wordpress blog posts created from a Google+ post: https://twitter.com/tchebotarev/status/534348676080992256

Image Buyers Are Using @500px Prime, says @JeffSullPhoto http://t.co/7f6JfAFHr8
— Evgeny Tchebotarev (@tchebotarev) November 17, 2014

I experience decent results on Google+ when sharing individual photos, but for some reason the filtering algorithms on Google+ seem to demote my album shares somewhat, more heavily restrict shares of other posts, and severely restrict shares  of external links.  Worst of all, much of the interaction I see is from users far from my target customer base, so Google's current heavy and skewed filtering algorithm renders G+ practically worthless in my experience.  But I have a lot of confidence in Google to eventually correct course and get on a productive path.  So although my initial 4-5 posts per day for its first year dropped to 1 per day for the next year and again to more sporadic contributions this year as the site fails to deliver broad engagement, when it eventually does, I want to be there.  I've set up Google+ pages to use when they become fully functional, such as when they can connect with and follow (circle) more than a few users per day before maxing out some limit.

In the meantime, any work you invest to maintain a placeholder stake in G+, or to make posts such as URL shares which are likely to be barely distributed on G+, doesn't have to go to waste, since those posts can have a second life on your blog.

It's no small benefit that those blog posts aren't restricted by any severe filtering to hide them from your followers, as they might have been on the original social media site.  One good tweet of your blog post, and it may have more potential viewers than the original post had on the social media site.  And your social media sites may supply that traffic.  Even if there are few eyeballs on your G+ posts or they're not views from your target customers or subscribed (circling) G+ users, there's no reason why you can link to the resulting blog post and drive traffic there from Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

If you'd like to consider having your social media posts mirrored to a Wordpress blog, take a look at the Google+ to Wordpress plugin:  http://sm2wp.com/  You'll also see the Twitter version there, Social Media 2 WordPress for Twitter.

Your G+ posts can appear on your blog

To see how they look on a blog, check out mine at www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com.  I just switched on the Twitter plugin, so I may have some fine tuning to do in the plugin settings before it works exactly the way I want it to, but you can get the gist of what it does.  Thanks to the developer +Daniel Treadwell.  He provides a free version of each plugin which imports the last 10 G+ posts, with comments, or the Twitter version with interaction as well, so you can try each of them out.  To make use of Wordpress plugins you'll need to have a "self-hosted" copy of Wordpress on your own Web site.  Other than the learning curve involved in setting that up, searching for the name of the plugins through your Wordpress installation, and installing and using them, is pretty straightforward.

Perhaps +Google will consider reporting our G+ activity in +Google Analytics so sponsors can see and recognize that as part of the value we offer.  But the filtering of the distribution of your G+ posts may still impede their visibility on G+, so having them available on an external blog enables you to make full use of the content, while you have full tracking and credit for how many people view it (at least directly on the blog).  It's surprising that Google didn't offer similar G+ to +Blogger post migration ages ago (and it's surprising that the existing Blogger to G+ posting capability suffers the same heavy filtering and reduced views that any other external link seems to experience).  Google Analytics could offer the unique strategic advantage of reporting of the combined views of the same post on G+ and Blogger, but a great baby step in the right direction would be any reporting of G+ posts at all.

500px Wants Your Feedback

How has the site 500px been for you lately?
Do you like their new Groups functionality?

They want your feedback, follow the link in their tweet to the questionnaire:

Would you like to speak with us about your thoughts and opinions on @500px? Fill out this questionnaire https://t.co/yLWY9KpSas
— 500px Help (@500px_Help) October 8, 2014

See you there! https://500px.com/JeffSullivan

Chrome Extension Shows Klout Scores in Your Twitter Feed

Sometimes when new people start interacting with you on social media you don't have a lot of context.  Or with people you may have been connected to for a while, how active are they?  You can only keep track of roughly up to 150 relationships in your life, so for online interaction, a number of tools have been developed to help you make sense of the rest.

You may be familiar with +Klout, which ranks people for their activity and interactions online.  It has some drawbacks, like over-ranking people for activity volume rather than content quality, and failing to demote serial copyright violators who mainly re-upload others' images, but for a brief glimpse it at least tells you if they are active on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+.  A Klout score of 70 or above for example indicates a ranking in the top 10% of social media users.

Here are a couple of examples, the one above looking at +Andy Hawbaker's Twitter feed and  the one below looking at the feed for +Sierra Trading Post:

See #Klout scores in your Twitter feed with this Chrome extension: https://t.co/8VUBeZwz4o pic.twitter.com/ZCDyWdiYAV
— Jeff Sullivan Photo (@JeffSullPhoto) September 15, 2014

I took a look at their Twitter feeds after Sierra Trading Post licensed one of my photos for an article on night photography.  I like giving back, so I went to Sierra Trading Post and bought clothing from +Columbia Sportswear and fishing gear from +Ross Reels , +Umpqua Feather Merchants, +frogg toggs and others.  Thanks Sierra Trading Post for using my photo, for helping me upgrade my clothing and gear!

MT @AndyHawbaker: 3 outdoor photography tips http://t.co/5lxke2QxkG astrophoto by @jeffsullphoto pic.twitter.com/sKJDlXH7p7
— Jeff Sullivan Photo (@JeffSullPhoto) September 15, 2014

Guaranteed Delivery Photo Sharing Networks: Flickr, Instagram, Twitter

A crate originally containing blasting caps, explosive charges used to set off dynamite, sits in an abandoned house in the historic mining town of Bodie, California. 

The "handle carefully" label on the box is good advice for photographers in the fragmented world of online photography sharing world.  While other sites shelter copyright violators, invade your privacy and threaten to sell your photos without any benefit to you, Flickr remains a key place for serious photographers, arguably THE place.  But if you want to connect with friends and family on social media sites, or grow your audience with photographers who haven't found or returned to Flickr yet, you may have to spread a few of your photos around a bit.  Sites don't all connect to one another, and they have different functionality, so details can get lost from site to site, and where you share to or from can affect how well your photos are received where they end up.

Let's consider Instagram, Twitter and Flickr.  Instagram can be a receptive place for mobile phone photos, but I don't spend much time on Instagram.  I have more followers on Twitter, and Twitter is known as a place for real time updates.  But Instagram photos shared directly to Twitter don't show up with a preview image, greatly reducing the odds that anyone will see, let alone respond to, your tweet.  So if I want to make a mobile phone share to Instagram and also reach my friends who might be on Twitter, it's best to post to Instagram and Flickr at once, then from Flickr share to Twitter.  A Flickr share to Twitter does result in a photo being posted with the tweet, with a thumbnail included in the left colum, so your odds of interaction with your post are much higher.  But most importantly there's also a link back to the original photo on Flickr, a full-featured "home base" for photography.

Many sites have popped up over the years enabling sharing photos, but many of them have implemented filters preventing all of the people who have subscribed to see you photos from actually seeing them.  Flickr does not prevent other photographers from seeing your work, it does not tolerate or even facilitate copyright violators like some other sites, it hasn't had privacy issue after privacy issue, there haven't been scandals where they would allow selling of your work without your knowledge or permission, and most importantly, it remains the photography place with the strongest tagging, grouping, album, location, date and interestingness-ranking functionality, that intelligent searches can be performed on.  So when your'e going to a national park and want to get ideas on where to go and what to see at that time of year, you can perform a search and find some great images and places.  Others can similarly find your images that way.  And everyone is easily accessible, you just post a question below their photograph or send them a flickrmail, there's no weird layer of site intervention over who can "friend" whom, or which people can communicate with each other.

For this photo I took an iPhone photo and used the free Snapseed app to post-process it and post it simultaneously to Flickr and Instagram.  So technically it started here as well as there.  Then I used the Flickr to Twitter sharing function to  tweet the photo with a preview image and link back here on Flickr.  It's simple, fast, gets the photo were I need it, and lets me keep my portfolio grounded on Flickr where I can best manage it.

Where I want a more subtle and controlled edit I may wait to import my iPhone images into Lightroom and upload the edited images from my PC to Flickr.  In that case I then go to the Flickr app and I can download my Lightroom-edited photo on Flickr to my phone's camera roll storage.  Like magic, any of my photos on Flickr, even ones taken on a DSLR, can be shared to otherwise mobile-centric apps like Instagram that way.

With the strong tagging/metadata and search functionality it seems like Flickr is still one of the places editors look first to find images.  It'll be interesting to see whether the new licensing functionality announced last week can reinforce and amplify that trend.

5 Chrome Extensions That Improve Google+

5 Chrome Extensions That Improve Google+

Google+ has only been around about 6 weeks. It's getting rave reviews, for a number of reasons:

1) The "circles" concepts enables posts to be highly targeted, so you send information to exactly who will want it, and you receive less uninteresting material as well.

2) Less threat of your data/photos being misused? Google has had time to learn from Facebook's careless treatment of personal data and the negative reaction to Facebook's apparent intent to sell your photos for random, who-knows-what use.

3) It's much easier to connect. I've been on Google+ 2 or 3 weeks and I already have far, far more interaction over there, on a platform far smaller than Facebook.

4) Twitter with photos and no 140 character limit, Facebook without the 400 character limit. Just say what you need to say.

They're trying to grow gradually so as not to bog down the service so it can be hard to register, but each user has an allocation of 150 invitations, so let me know if you need one (I'll need your email address).

If you're already on Google +, look ma up. Here's my standard Google+ URL:
https://plus.google.com/107459220492917008623/posts

Once you're on Google+ you can register for a shorter, easier to type and remember redirect like this one, using Google Plus Nick:
http://gplus.to/JeffSullivan

Is it Facebook vs. Flickr, or Both vs. Google?

Ancient Life of the Cosmos, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (Death Valley next!).

An article on the PhotoShelter blog "What Google trends Says About Wedding & Stock Photography, and Photo Websites" proposes that a drop in Flickr ratings on Google Trends may be due to an increase in the popularity of Facebook for photo sharing. I disagree strongly with the article's conclusions.

The drop in Yahoo-owned Flickr status in competitor Google's trend ratings was probably more due to internal workings of the Google search engine to stop referring Google image search results over to their competitor's site Flickr. I've seen this firsthand in my Flickr statistics. I used to get nearly 30% of my Flickr views from Google search users, now I get close to zero. Meanwhile my Google hits on Panoramio have skyrocketed to over 5 million views on a handful of images.

Facebook's ratings on Goolge Trends also pummeted, so the same engineered obsolescence is probably true for Google's referral to anything over on Facebook, since Facebook is now emerging as a competitor for Google's dominance over Internet eyeballs. Facebook's drop in Google's ratings is far too precipitous to be attributed to a simple familiarity with Facebook's name, as proposed in the article.

The existing fight between Yahoo and Google has expanded to include Facebook, as demonstrated by Facebook's announcement this week of an email service that aspires consolodate messages from all sources. Google is simply taking prudent steps to minimize the extent to which their site promotes their competitors.

The bottom line for photographers? Flickr will remain strong with Yahoo search users, Google-friendly sites will dominate Google searches, and Facebook is an island unto itself, albeit a really big island that wants to aggregate all your content.

For the moment Flickr is a site with robust sharing photo sharing features but a rabid paranoia of all things external, including standard social media platforms, so it's dangerous to try to interact around Flickr photos (post external links and they reportedly may delete your account suddenly and unexpectedly). So Facebook appears to be the only major player with a viable solution friendly to social media integration at the moment. Although their tools for photographers seem a little lacking at the moment, their pool of app developers are working diligently to solve that problem for them.