Photobucket.

Facebook.

These are just some of the many options available these days for sharing photos online. I’ve always wondered what are the true drivers for one person to choose one option over the other, so that is why I started this online poll at LinkedIn.

What drives you to choose a service to share [...]]]>

Flickr.

Photobucket.

Facebook.

These are just some of the many options available these days for sharing photos online. I’ve always wondered what are the true drivers for one person to choose one option over the other, so that is why I started this online poll at LinkedIn.

What drives you to choose a service to share photos online?

Ease of use is the king feature not only across genders but also across age groups.

A male search engine marketing specialist explains the reasoning behind the the preference of ease of use:

Ease of use for me. I do not want to spend hours figuring out on how to customize the features. Another factor for me would be the strength of privacy features.

What about price?

Surprisingly, price was not indicated as major influence in selecting a service to share photos online.  Only 6% of all respondents pointed out price as the major driver for selecting a service to share photos online.

A plausible explanation for this is provided by a male HR software developer:

I worry more about online services that never charge at any level. Its a good bet they will not be in business for a long time. I rather spend a small amount, get some hard copy pics my kid can hold, and have a service that will be around in the long term.

In general people don’t mind spending money on keeping their pictures safely stored, either online or at home. A female real state financial analyst reported spending spending $129 at Costo to purchase a 500GB hard drive and several respondents told me that they have no problem dishing out the close to $25 dollars/year for a Flickr Pro account.

Even though, people in general are willing to spend some money in keeping or sharing their photos online, they are easily turned off by hidden charges.

A female law student provides an example:

I will tell you what completely turned me off: Kodak Gallery recently started threatening to delete your account if you didn’t make any purchases from them within a certain time period. I ordered back-up discs of all pics I had on there and deleted my account myself!

What about other features?

Throughout the gathering of the answers, there was a constant demand for other answer options. Here are a couple ones.

I use Flickr because it has an open API, and as a result, there are millions of 3rd party applications and easy ways to embed in websites without having to use a flickr-branded widget. Flickr, Picasa, Kodak, Shutterfly, etc, are all pretty easy use, but Flickr is easy to use, tag and share. – Male sales engineer.

For me, “unlimited” is only one “acceptable” storage size. But, because I’m not a professional photographer, more than 5 GB is same as unlimited. - Male programmer.

I agree with the sharing a large amount of photos easily, and sharing those photos without making the people you are sending your photos to create an account to see them!!! - Female law student.

Conclusion

When developing an online photo sharing service, make your number one priority that it is easy to use. A second important feature is that it needs to be highly viral (“my friend are already there!”).  However, your service doesn’t necessary need to be the “talk of the town”. Users of online photo sharing services prefer user friendliness over “what’s hot now” any time.

If you build an easy-to-use product that is highly viral, your own users entitle you to charge a price. Just make sure that you’re very clear about that price.

has been great! Thank you very much for reading it. Here is a breakdown of the number of daily readers provided by WordPress BlogStats

I am really happy that my Spanish colleague, Gemma (who writes a great web analytics blog in Spanish called ¿Dónde está Avinash [...]]]>

The response to the post:

Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly

has been great! Thank you very much for reading it. Here is a breakdown of the number of daily readers provided by WordPress BlogStats

I am really happy that my Spanish colleague, Gemma (who writes a great web analytics blog in Spanish called ¿Dónde está Avinash cuando se le necesita?, a great tribute to Avinash Kaushik) found some inspiration to use Google Trends (one of my personal favorite tools!).

Another great tool for broad research is Google Ad Planner (currently in Beta, so you need an invitation, mine took about a week to arrive).

Let’s take a look at the BIG 5 (Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide) of online digital photo sharing using this tool:

Flickr versus Snapfish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly: using Google Ad Planner

Google Ad Planner provides much more in-depth information on a monthly basis (the figures for unique visitors and pageviews are on a 30-day basis).  The reach is for the United States.  As discussed on the previous post, Photobucket appears to continue to have the upper-hand over Flickr.

What I found really interesting is that if I was to theoretically put ads on these 5 sites trying to reach everybody in the United States, I would reach 31 million or have a country reach of 13% or have 660 million pageviews.

Do you think that is a lot? Wrong! Take a look what would happen if I just select Facebook and Myspace:

That’s 90 million unique visitors or a country reach of 39% or 20 billion pageviews!

Does that mean that advertising on Facebook and Myspace is better than advertising on the top 5 of online digital photo sharing?

If your objective is to monetize on printing services, I would dare to say no.

Why?

Take a look at the age and income distribution of the audience at Myspace using Google Ad Planner:

Compare it with the demographics of the audience at Shutterfly:

Obviously Shutterfly has a more mature audience with more spendable income, so they would be more prone to spend on printing services than a younger audience with a tigther budget.

Of course, you could argue against this hypothesis.

Let me hear your thoughts.

Daily Unique Visitors of 5 key players in the online photo sharing industry.

For the period May 2007 – September 2008, Flickr and Photobucket [...]]]>

An important part of my job is to understand the trends in the online photo sharing industry and I wanted to provide a couple of insights to my readers using Google Trends.

Daily Unique Visitors of 5 key players in the online photo sharing industry.

For the period May 2007 – September 2008, Flickr and Photobucket compete for the highest number of daily unique visitors worldwide out of the five selected online photo sharing:  Flickr, Snapfish, Shutterfly, Photobucket and Slide.

Take a look at the latest performance of Photobucket and Flickr:

What caused that there were more daily unique visitors at Photobucket than at Flickr?

Photobucket is capturing more daily unique visitors than Flickr in the top photo sharing market: U.S.

However, Photobucket should not rest in its laurels, because Flickr is ahead in the second most important photo sharing market: India.

What about Slide?  Slide enjoyed an important spike in the last quarter of 2007, but its number of daily unique visitors is coming back to previous levels.   What caused this?

2 reasons: hi5 and England.

Worlwide, people who search for the the term “slide”, also search for:

As you can see, hi5 appears several times and it different languages!

This is relevant because hi5‘s daily unique visitors worldwide dwarfs that of the top 5 players in the photo sharing business (note: I drop Snapfish, because Google Trends only accepts 5 websites at a time).

Plus, Slide did pretty good during that period in England!

Finally, what about Snapfish and Shutterfly?

They depend on each other because:

People who search for “snapfish” also search for “shutterfly”.

And people who search for “shutterfly also search for “snapfish”.

In conclusion:

1. Markets outside of the United States DO matter!  Increased demand in important markets (e.g. Slide in England, Flickr in India) can generate a lot of views, which potentially means increased ad revenue.  Just ask Dave McClure, web analytics guru and blogger at Master of 500 Hats.
2. Despite all the hype about international markets, the leader must keep its focus on the top market, the U.S.
3. Keep a close eye on the SEO tactics of your rivals and copy what seems to work (Shutterfly and Snapfish).

What do you think?