WebProNews

I’ve put exactly one picture on MySpace; my Facebook profile contains a whopping five or so.  Yet a new Hitwise report proves that this is not the norm, and that traffic from social networks gives an extreme boost to a lot of photo-sharing sites.

Social Networks Feed Photo Sharing

“Photobucket has been the #1 ranked Photography website based on UK visits since February, when it overtook Flickr,” reports Heather Hopkins, Hitwise UK’s vice president of research.  “Photobucket has held that #1 ranking largely due to traffic from Bebo and MySpace, with 33% of the site’s traffic coming from Bebo last week and 22% from MySpace.”

She then continues, “By contrast, Google was the #1 source of visits to Flickr last week, accounting for 19% of the site’s visits, 5% came from Google Images, 4% from Blogger and only 2.4% from MySpace.”

There may be other factors at work - accusations of censorship could have hurt Flickr, for example - but Hopkins’s numbers are solid.  Also, if you think Photobucket’s data looks odd, other (possibly less-well-known-in-America) photo-sharing sites are even more dependent on social networks.

“Last week, 83% of RockYou’s traffic came directly from a social network, with 42% coming from Bebo and 37% from Facebook,” according to Hitwise.  “Similarly, 77% of Slide.com’s traffic came directly from a social network, with 43% coming from Facebook, 23% from Bebo and 8% from MySpace.”

Wow - a relationship in which three-quarters of a company’s business comes from another site.  Egyptian plovers, anyone?