In June, Yahoo! Photos began to close, and users are being encouraged to join Flickr. Later in the month, Yahoo! began including Flickr images in Yahoo! Image Search. These efforts have resulted in an increase in Flickr's US market share of 38% in the past four weeks (week ending 7/7/07 vs. week ending 6/9/07). Flickr is now the #2 photography website in the US, with 6.42% of category visits for the week ending 7/7/07. Photobucket still leads with a whopping 43.5% share . Here is a list of the top 5 photography sites as of last week. Back in March 2007, Flickr was at #3 with a market share of 4.57%.

You can see on the chart below how Flickr overtook Yahoo! Photos at the beginning of June (in the purple and navy lines on the left axis). You can also see just how much Yahoo! Image Search results helped increase Flickr's traffic (in the thin lines on the right axis). As of last week, Yahoo! Image Search was the leading source of traffic to Flickr, accounting for nearly 18% of its upstream visits. Previously Google had been its largest souce of traffic.

It is worth noting that Flickr has a truly global footprint, and has greater share of the photography category in other markets. Spend a few minutes on Flickrvision and you will get a sense for Flickr's global reach. Hitwise global data shows that Flickr is the #2 photography site (with Photobucket at #1) in both the UK and Australia, with about 10% market share in both countries. Expect it to keep growing both here and abroad.

LeeAnn Prescott

LeeAnn Prescott is Research Director for Hitwise covering the US market. This post was originally posted on Hitwise blog here.