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.

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!