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 [...]]]>

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.

]]> http://idaconcpts.com/2009/10/09/what-drives-you-to-choose-a-service-to-share-photos-online/feed/ 0 http://idaconcpts.com/2009/05/29/photo-sharing-websites/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=photo-sharing-websites http://idaconcpts.com/2009/05/29/photo-sharing-websites/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 20:19:44 +0000 Damian Davila http://idaconcpts.com/?p=569 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 [...]]]>

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.

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.

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:

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:

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!

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, [...]]]>

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

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!).

Dinner at Nagoya, Japan on 03/08/08