The Juicy Cow

How many people are using Flickr? How many are Pro (subscribers) users? How many pictures do they have in their accounts? Do they fav pictures? How many contacts do they have?

First of all, what is Flickr? Flickr is defined on Wikipedia as:

“A photo sharing website and web services suite, and an online community platform, which is generally considered an early example of a Web 2.0 application.”

Yahoo! acquired Flickr in March 2005 for a price tag of around US$35M according to Om Malik. Today’s Flickr value is probably closer to the Billions than the Millions.
It’s truly an awesome application to publish and share your pictures on. I use it together with my photoblog. Thanks to the Flickr API every time I publish a new picture on my photoblog it goes automatically to my Flickr account with description and tags…
I think the most important part of Flickr is the community. Flickr is very popular among digital photographers. The direct consequence of a very active community is that you can get a lot of interesting feedback on your pictures. It’s also a way to get to know other photographers from your city and so on…

So, I studied Flickr’s accounts during 15 days, looking on a daily basis at a panel of active users (twice a day, at 9am and 9pm I had a look to the 10 last updated accounts). Here are the conclusions of my study.

Disclaimer: Those data are not official data from Flickr. They are VERY approximates and should only be used to get a general idea of what’s going on at Flickr.com.

Fig1. 6-8 Millions users

This figures come from the very few known figures from Flickr:
- When Flickr got acquired by Yahoo! they released a couple of numbers regarding the number of users in the months before and following the acquisition.
- Michael Arrington got his hands on another bunch of figures at the end of august 2006 when Flickr released the geotagging function.
Assuming that the Flickr user number kept growing at the same speed I could estimate the actual user number to between 6 and 8 millions.

Fig2. 1.1 Billion pictures

It is quite easy to figure out how many pictures are on Flickr. What you have to do is to look at the ID of the last picture uploaded on Flickr (on the “Everyone’s Photos” section of your home page for example). This id will give you the total pictures number. However, some pictures are deleted and those IDs are not re-used. So I had to find a way to evaluate what percentage of Flickr pictures were deleted. To do so I generated a hundred of random numbers in between 1 and 1.1 billion. It gave me a random selection of a hundred pictures to look at. And I was able to observe that about 10% of those pictures were actually deleted. So to get a more accurate evaluation of Flickr’s pictures number I deduced 10% from the last picture ID.

Fig3. 50% are private pictures

My random selection of a hundred pictures (see note for Fig2.) gave me this other information. Private pictures on Flickr are pictures that only people declared as “Friends” or “Family” can see. I guess a lot of photographers are using Flickr as a backup system. They then upload massive amount of pictures and set their account to private. It is not that bad for Flickr because those accounts, being private, are not viewed and don’t use bandwidth. They only use disk space which is very cheap at the moment (and getting cheaper and cheaper).

Fig4. +11 Millions pics/day (+125 pics/sec)

This number is easy to calculate. It’s calculated after an average 24h/growth over a 15 days period of time.

Fig5. 60% of active users are PRO

This percentage came out my 15 days studies among active users. My guess is that this percentage is quite big, even within the global community.

Fig6. Pro active users have an average of 2400 pictures, 20 contacts and 54 favorites

That’s another bunch of statistics that I was able to calculate during my 15 days study. It says that Pro users have about 12 times more pictures than what a free account could let them have (limitation is 200 pictures “viewable” for free account). I saw some users with more than 50 000 pictures on their account. It doesn’t surprise me that much. If I had to put all my pictures on my Flickr account I would easily reach 100 000 pictures (and about 100GB+ of load for Flickr’s servers ;)).

Flickr is a truly awesome application. It is often considered as one of the first large example of Web 2.0 application. It is also one of the only business where Google is not able to compete with Yahoo! They tried with Picasa, but it doesn’t have the same sex appeal than Flickr and definitely doesn’t have the community aspects of Flickr.

So what’s happening with Flickr today?

The big deal in September for Flickr will be to merge with Yahoo! Photo. Service that has been stopped to be concentrated with Flickr.com. Yahoo! Photo is the largest photo-sharing site on Internet with more than 2 billions photos. Merging with Yahoo! Photo, Flickr will become a giant with about 3.5 Billions pictures on its servers… Growing fast, very fast (probably of 25 millions new pictures per day)!

Other news is that Flickr will add video to its offer. So users wont have to go to different places when emptying their memory cards (Flickr and… Youtube).

We can then observe that Yahoo! is pushing hard on Flickr. I reckon it’s a very wised choice, according to the fact that Yahoo! Advertisement platform is not doing great and that Yahoo! suffers from a quite bad “un-cool” image compare to Google. Using Flickr’s name (which is totally cool ;)) to brand Yahoo’s services (photos and videos) is very smart. And it’s also the only spot where Yahoo! can hope to make a difference with Google.

So yes, Flickr does love you. They really do

If you like this topic (Digital picture…) you can also have a look to my post about the Evolution of Digital Photography: 5 major trends.

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