Facebook as the biggest photo site: facts and comments

original techcrunch here

pay attention to the numbers, especially in the second article.
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What do you think, Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte are already the largest photo archives in Russia? maybe someone thread owns specific numbers?

[the translation is not literal, naturally]



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If Facebook has a thread of real application, it's Photos, no shit. It is a heed! - the biggest photo roll in the whole web. 69% of all monthly Facebook visitors (in the world) either watch or upload photos (according to comScore) in Photos. And more than 10 billion photos have been loaded there by tireless users.

At the same time, Facebook seems to be starting to break away from competing organizations. As can be seen from the graph (this is such a picture at the top), back in September 2008, the top three photo dumps in the US went head to head: Facebook - 23.9 million unik per month, then Photobucket - 21.3 million , Flickr - 19.5 million (data for visitors only from USA). But by January 2009, the monthly audience (US only) Facebook Photos just blew up by 41% to 33.6 million . While Photobucket sluggishly clicked around the corner - only by 7% to 22.8 million , well, Flickr was also writhing unconvincingly - by 12% to 21.9 million . Pikas is rapidly moving somewhere far away (about 5.5 million in September), but so far in a non-trivial place with a significant lag - 8.1 million (an increase, however, more than 30%, but in absolute figures only 2.5 million - FB an increase of almost 10 million).

In other words - Facebook Photos has increased the gap from the nearest competitor (Photobucket, if we talk about the United States) from 2.6 million to 10.8 million unik a month. On a global scale, the gap between Facebook Photos and Flickr (which is No. 2 in the world and seems to have already Photobucket in the US) increased from 41.2 million to 87 million.

What the hell is happening - the author asks himself and competing photo garbage? And then it is easy to guess: the biggest factor - Facebook Photos is the default photo service of the largest social network in the world! Oh, how ... And of all the viral features (I don’t know how to call viral loops more adequately, for these are no loops ... but just forks, I would say ... well, you will understand what this is about), from which FB gets fat and grows with new users, Photos - probably the most viral. Namely: when one of their friends uses your name as a tag for a photo, you receive an email. This single feature makes of a stupid routine - tagging and organizing your photo dump - a powerful form of communication that connects people through their common past (meaning that the pictures - they are always from the past ..), and this happens right online and visually. “And I wouldn’t be surprised,” the author wants to look smart — if users click on these reminders in the mail (in order to poke off for pornography now signed by their names, more ...) more often than reminders from any other FB service, including private messages".

But this dexterous thing with reminders when tagging (or tagging? ... never mind, I think) has long been making users pleasantly FB. What, however, happened in September that accelerated the swelling of the Photos to such Chinese sizes? - again, the author’s restless brain does not calmly look at South park ... The answer is right there, because Cartman doesn’t wait: “It's all re-design!” It was then that a non-lingual FB arranged it, and as part of this event added a Photos button to each personal page .

(The picture above is unique from the US, monthly. The picture below is all unique : 153.3 million - Facebook Photos in December , 66.7 million - Flickr , 45.5 million - Picasa , 42.7 - Photobucket)



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There is a great addition to this article: a small note on CrunchGear, the original is here.

[translation is not literal, of course]:

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Doug Beaver (I don’t know what a man is) on the Facebook Engineering blog accidentally made a mistake (October 14, 2008 at 6:03 pm) that they crossed the border of 10 billion downloaded photos. Since the servers of non-poor FB store 4 copies of each nettle of the type “I and Paris” of different sizes at once, then at that time 40 billion jpegs were inexorably indexed in the bottomless stomachs of the FB file servers.

Doug Beaver carefully dropped some more words on this topic:

- 2-3 terabytes of photos are downloaded by users to the site every day
- the current size of the entire landfill is more than 1 petabyte
- more than 15 billion jpeg shows their powerful servers to curious users browsers daily
- during peak hours, traffic surpasses 300,000 image impressions per second

One non-working blogger (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/10/candid_camera.php) inserts his 5 kopecks in one place:

“From hell to do, I searched 10 billion pics on the FB and found that 3 billion of them contain an image of beer , in kegs (these are barrels such as you can pour out in bars), tin cans, and bottles. 1.5 billion contained an image of a bra . And 675 million - at the same time could boast a picture of beer and bra "

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What does this have to do with startups? - it may be impolite to ask someone a thread. Such is - by all indications, there is a non-zero number of people associated with startups who are to some extent social networks. They should be interesting, it seems to me. No? ... Yes, and FB in fact before our eyes has grown from a startup into what it is today. So, the story of his success - what could be more interesting for a start-uper than the story of another successful startup?