Yahoo Photos closure bumps Flickr market share

By Stephen Shankland – July 10, 2007 12:40 PM PDT

Yahoo Photos' loss is Flickr's gain.

Flickr's market share has risen as Yahoo Photos' has dropped.

(Credit: Hitwise)

Yahoo began shutting down Yahoo Photos last month, and now Flickr passed it to become the No. 2 photo-sharing site in terms of Internet traffic in the United States, according to monitoring firm Hitwise.

Flickr now has 6.42 percent of the visits to photo-sharing sites, up from 4.57 percent in March, Hitwise said.

That's a significant jump, but it's not all Yahoo might want: Flickr's 1.85 percentage-point increase was more than offset by Yahoo Photos' 2.6-point drop from 5.79 percent to 3.19 percent. And Flickr also got a boost from incorporation of its images into Yahoo's search at the end of June.

Flickr remains a distant second in U.S. traffic compared with Photobucket, which rose from 41.4 percent market share to 43.52 percent in June, Hitwise said. However, Hitwise researcher LeeAnn Prescott said on her blog, "It is worth noting that Flickr has a truly global footprint and has greater share of the photography category in other markets."