We have just received Yahoo’s Flickr trend report for March 2012. As with most releases, it contains some amazing looking numbers. Unfortunately we haven’t got numbers handy for other services to compare to but looking at the ones from Flickr, they still show a pretty impressive stature. What we would love to see though is some periodical comparison of the same numbers on a monthly and yearly basis.
As one of the most popular photo sharing sites, it’s always fascinating to find out what is going on at Flickr and how it’s performing under the increasing onslaught of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Being one of the oldest photo sites, it’s disheartening to see that the site hasn’t innovated enough to keep up with the challenges but it is chugging along. It recently restructured its membership offering and redesigned the contacts page. More changes are said to be coming before the end of the year.
With more than 218 million publicly accessible Creative Commons licensed images, I think it would be great for Flickr to promote itself as a comprehensive Creative Commons image gallery. For those who are not willing to subscribe to premium stock photo services for whatever reason, Flickr’s CC library would be a great resource. Of course, being an image library would require photos to have properly attributed tags and Flickr isn’t lacking in that department with 86.5 million tags recorded.
Flickr users love barbecue, pizza, and pie with 370 thousand photos tagged with “Pizza”. Apparently the top ten of the most popular foods on Flickr is filled with fast food or junk food. Fries, chips, sushi, burger, and sandwich fill up the list with salad and pasta as well as bbq being the only non-fast food entries on the list, although you could probably make an argument against salad.
The most popular camera on Flickr remains the iPhone 4 followed by Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Nikon D90, Canon EOS Rebel T2i and EOS 7D. The report doesn’t show the breakdown of cameras between DSLRs, pockets and camera phones but you’ll find that the iPhone family holds the top four among camera phones if you go to Flickr’s camera page.
Despite its seemingly waning popularity and the lack of exposure in the media lately, Flickr still holds a massive library of more than six billion photos, almost one photo for every person on this planet. If it can deliver on that message and make photo search a significant aspect of the service it might get itself back on people’s radars again.
There are of course plenty of ideas buzzing around at Flickr on revitalizing the service and some of which are obviously already waiting to be launched given the hint that it gave earlier this year. The popularity of mobile photo sharing is unfortunately one trend that Yahoo failed to capitalize on early enough but right now, even Instagram isn’t making money on that although it seems to be pretty close to a business model. With more than six billion photos, the opportunities for Flickr to take back the market are wide open. Perhaps Flickr might be interested in running a photo hack day in Southeast Asia?
You can see the three-page infographic on our dailylicious site.