Social Media By the Numbers: Flickr

As first times go, everyone remembers theirs. My first encounter with a social media site was with Flickr. Seeing as this was my first, Im not sure why I took so long to write about it in this series, other than to say that, from an SEO perspective, Flickr is not as sexy as StumbleUpon, Digg et all.

This week I take a look at Flickr, by the numbers.

The History:

Online Since Nov 22 2003
Ludicorp, a Vancouver BC, Canada based company, launched Flickr in February 2004
March 2005, Yahoo! Inc. acquired Ludicorp and Flickr.
On May 16, 2006, Flickr updated its services from beta to "gamma"
December 29, 2006 the upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month
co-founder Stewart Butterfield has remained on as General Manager

The Traffic:

7.2 million registered users
Flickr.com has a traffic rank of: 38
Percent of global Internet users who visit this site: 1.5495%
Reaches over 16 million U.S. monthly uniques
Page Views per Month: 676,169,929
Average Page Views per Visit: 16.13
Visits per Month: 41,907,318
Uniques per Month: 16,759,735
Percentage of audience that frequent a site more than once per month: 31

Flickr users come from these countries:
* United States: 20.8%
* Chile: 9.0%
* Vietnam: 3.9%
* United Kingdom: 3.4%
* Canada: 2.9%

Flickr traffic rank in other countries:
* Chile: 17
* United States: 21
* United Kingdom: 21
* Canada: 22
* Vietnam: 26

Audience Keywords:
Eva Mendes
yahoo images
Adriana Lima
Laura Vandervoort
Danica Patrick
Michelle Trachtenberg
English Wikipedia

The Financials:

Again, numbers are burried in Yahoo! Inc's revenue reporting, but internet research shows that the site broke even in 2006
The core of the business is the premium subscription service
Still experimenting more with branded advertising and theres contextual advertising in the search
BloggingStocks claims the Pro accounts from Flickr represent only an eight-tenths-of-one-percent drop in the Yahoo! revenue bucket quarterly

The Demographics:

The typical visitor reads The Bosh, hollywoodtuna.com and visits cinemablend.com.
53% Male Visitors
21% of audience earn over $100K
Percentage of visitors having no college education: 44%
Percentage of households with children aged 6-17: 66%
Average Age:
18-24: 18%
25-34: 23%
35-44: 21%
45-54: 19%
55-64: 13%
65+: 7%

Did You Know?

There are 62,504 sites that link to flickr.com
It hosts over 2 billion images.
Some key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness (for which a patent is pending)
During the week of June 28, 2005, all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law
The upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month from 20MB
In June 2007, Flickr changed the tagline on the logo to "Flickr LOVES YOU"
Flickr offers a web-service API
Flickr Video is coming soon....probably in the next few months.
Flickr uses the Geo microformat on the pages and have more than 12.6 million geotagged photos
Flickr users are so steamed at the prospect of Microsoft taking over Yahoo that they're fighting back by launching this unique page of photos.

Once youve gone through the trouble of uploading your photos, tagging them and creating albums, it'll take something remarkable to make you move. Flickr was the first to offer social tagging and viewing features make easy to use. In going through the research for this piece, I was surprised to see that Flickr isn't even the market leader in the space, however I can't help but think that a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo will make Flickr a big winner and their future even brighter