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Shutting down Yahoo Photos in favor of the popular Flickr service has helped lift Flickr's market share of photography traffic.

Flickr Rises As Yahoo Photos Departs

While Photobucket commands the photography category with 43.5 percent of the market, Flickr's 6.42 percent of visits measured by Hitwise for the week ending July 7 proved good enough for second place.

Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott said Flickr's US market share grew by 38 percent in the four weeks leading up to July 7. In June, Yahoo began encouraging its Yahoo Photos users to migrate over to Flickr.

Prescott also noted how Flickr's traffic has shifted. Where Google once represented Flickr's largest source of traffic, Yahoo Image Search has taken over that place. Yahoo Image Search now accounts for almost 18 percent of Flickr's traffic.

The consolidation of image services has worked out for Yahoo, both in the US and internationally. We will be interested to see if Yahoo continues to trim its duplicate services under new CEO Jerry Yang.