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Among websites that allow visitors to store and share photos, Photobucket snares almost 44 percent of the market share of Photo Sharing Sites.

The Hitwise research firm doesn't even see Flickr in its top five Photo Sharing Sites by market share. One would think that a Flickr cover story on Newsweek and the ubiquitous presence of Flickr on blogs and in techie conversations would have propelled it to the top.

Not even close, with a 5.95 percent market share for the week ended June 17th, according to the post by Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott.

"In the SF tech bubble that I live in, most of the talk about photo sites has been centered on Flickr," wrote Prescott. "In fact, you could get the impression from most people I meet that Flickr is the ONLY site at which you can share and store photos."

Yahoo! Photos, Webshots Community, and Kodakgallery.com all garnered bigger shares than Flickr. Hitwise's results led to a couple of commenters questioning the report and what was perceived as an "apples and oranges" comparison between image hosting and photo community sites.

Prescott defended the Hitwise methodology, and noted that both Flickr and Photobucket share a common function: enabling image sharing. "The data reported in my blog is from our sample of 10 million US internet users. We report in market share of visits, which is a different metric than unique visitors," she wrote.

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