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

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?


Continue reading “What drives you to choose a service to share photos online?”

Photo Sharing Websites

The top question that people ask me when people find out about my online marketing and web analytics blog, is how I came up with the name idaconcpts.  I really like words that are similarly written and understood in several languages, and ideas and concepts are two of them.  I played around with different variations of these words, until I realized that what my blog was truly about was putting ideas and concepts into e-commerce.  Therefore, putting these ideas and concepts would be put to work into commerce, or would put the “e” in e-commerce.  Hence, idaconcpts.


Yahoo! Flickr - 468x60

One of the best things of writing at idaconcpts.com is that I have a passion for analyzing photo sharing websites and my readers seem to share that passion with me.

idaconcpts stats 05_28_2009

Over 34% of the readership at idaconcpts follows the posts about the BIG 5 of photo sharing: Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide.  Please note that I am limiting myself to websites (as opposed to desktop apps such as Picasa).  At the same time there will be debate about:

  1. why I am not including Myspace and Facebook (which obviously have major photo sharing activity),
  2. if I include photo printing services such as Shutterfly, why I don’t include major online photo printing services like Walmart and Costco, and
  3. if I am not including Picasa Web Albums, why am I selecting Slide, which obviously is not a photo sharing website, but rather a widget generator like Sprout Builder.

And my answer is that they are all great questions that I will tackle on future posts to come!

In the meantime, let’s continue the analysis of the BIG 5, which started back in November 2008 with the post Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly and continued with the follow-up post Revisiting Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly. In this posts we analyzed the traffic to these photo sharing websites through Google Ad Planner and Google Trends.  Today we will take a look through another great web analytics called Compete.

Compete is an awesome cloud computing web analytics tool that allows you access website activity info from any website.  The first killer feature of Compete is that it allows you to compare 5 websites side by side.  Even though Google Trends and Google Ad Planner do offer this service, Google Trends‘ information is quite limited, and Google Ad Planner’s information is limited to a handful of websites.

Here a couple snapshots of Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide using Compete:

Site Comparison of flickr.com (rank #32), snapfish.com (#587), shutterfly.com (#668), photobucket.com (#34), slide.com (#172) | Compete-1

Site Comparison of flickr.com (rank #32), snapfish.com (#587), shutterfly.com (#668), photobucket.com (#34), slide.com (#172) | Compete

The second killer feature of Compete is that it allows you to take a look into the subdomains (finally!) of entered websites.  Google Trends does not (as of 05/29/2009) allow that feature, it only allows you to take a look at the web analytics of the home page.

Remember point 2 above? With this tool I can finally tap into finding out how much traffic from walmart.com goes into photos.walmart.com:

Subdomains for walmart.com | Compete

Finally, Compete allows me to post these simple little graphs, which previously I had to take a snapshot using Skitch and upload to my blog.  I still love Skitch, but this saves time!

What about an updated analysis of Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Slide using Compete?

Dear reader, you already have a start with the post Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly and its follow-up post Revisiting Flickr versus Snapish versus Photobucket versus Slide versus Shutterfly. Now with Compete, you can slice and dice the data in no time!

Best of luck in your research!

WordPress Blog Stats, iPhone and Literature Review

From my last post, I got the attention from the WordPress staff! : )

Not to worry, I still love WordPress!  I just wish that the WordPress Blog Stats where as detailed as the Google Analytics.  One of my main complains is that the graphs are flash (opposed to JPEG, GIF, etc) and I cannot copy them here that easily.

Let’s take a look at the WordPress Blog Stats below from idaconcpts.com for the period between 08-06-08 and 08-13-08:

 

idaconcpts.com WordPress Blog Stats as of 08-13-08
idaconcpts.com WordPress Blog Stats as of 08-13-08

 

I apologize for the messiness.  Here are the main giveaways:

 

  • Flickr and Google are key search terms that drive readers to this blog.  Writing about those two companies should spark more interest about this blog.
  • If a reader arrives to my page, there is a high probability that he/she will check the “About the author” section.  It is the most popular page.  Caveat:  it is quite possible that most of these views happened on 08-06-08 when idaconcpts.com went live and in that day there was only one post and the “About the author” page.
  • I really need to work on making my articles more interesting, because I only had 9 views on the last 2 days (yes, the 13th is not done yet but this is the data so far!).
In more commercial news, today I got an 8GB iPhone 3G and I am really excited!  Hopefully this weekend I will be able to play around with it and download a couple of applications.  A colleague is developing a Hawaiian-themed game that he will put online.  It looks pretty darn good!  Will keep you posted both on my iPhone shenanigans and my colleague’s iPhone game launch.
Last night I received the following books from Amazon.com:
The Four Steps to the EpiphanyBook Cover
I am really excited and looking forward to review these books.  Blank’s work guides how I approach online users and has converted me 100% to the Customer Development Process.  Then, I want to review Clifton’s work to get a better understand of web metrics with Google Analytics.  Finally, I will literally follow Avinash’s book an hour a day to improve my understanding of web analytics.
Have a great day and now…get back to make some more money! : )
Dinner at Nagoya, Japan on 03/08/08
Dinner at Nagoya, Japan on 03/08/08