Blogs Gain With Hosted Images

Third-party image hosts have helped propel the growth in blogging, as their traffic increases along with it.

Sites like PhotoBucket and ImageShack have allowed bloggers to put a face to their online journals. And a garden. And a truck. And a cat. And all kinds of things a blogger can stuff into a digital camera’s memory card and upload.

Those uploads to image hosting sites lets bloggers add a visual element to their blogs. Traffic to image sites has grown dramatically. Among those sites referring traffic to image hosts are Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpace, LiveJournal, and Xanga. Nielsen//NetRatings notes in a report that users of image sites increased in number to over 14.7 million in August, quintupling user numbers from January.

Jon Gibs, senior research manager for Nielsen//NetRatings, said in the report: “The large rise in blogging activity has lifted other Web sites, the primary one being image hosting sites. Simple text-based ‘diaries’ have evolved into a more image-oriented presentation.”

So who’s doing all that image blogging? Girls, aged 12-17. The Nielsen//NetRatings report says over 2.2 million US visitors to image hosting were in that age and gender group. Males in the same age group made up some 1.5 million visitors to image hosts.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.