Less Flickr views, anyone?
May 31, 2007 10:36 amAn intersting question raised by Looker Lumet: ‘But as from last week, the views dropped enormously. In fact so dramatically, that it can not be, that suddenly my pictures are not that good or interesting anymore?‘
Yes, I ’suffer’ from the same. Where one of my pictures before easily made it to +500 views (with a +1k in one day max and a minimum of 100 or so) now a picture does ‘good as it comes to view rate’ when it reaches 300.
What’s causing this? Probably a combination of some of the following reasons:
- More SL photographs on Flickr in general. Hence more photographs in the Second Life pool. Hence less ‘display time’ on the official SecondLife.com site. Hence less clicks upon them.
- Me posting less ‘flesh’. Although the portrait of Vanny and Lisa with ’some nipple showing’ is stuck at 347 views as we speak.
- Me commenting less on other people’s pictures. And thus less people wanting to return the favour / curious about my stream and pictures.
- The new ‘labeling’ system. We are now amongst CGI or screenshots, not amongst normal photographs anymore. So a lot of people who have their flickr accounts configured to see only normal photographs are.. euhm.. missing out on our SL photographs. ;)
- Overal snapshot quality improved. I assume were our pictures used to ‘jump out’, they do not do that anymore.
- Maybe Flickr changed its ‘view counting’ system? (Although I can’t find anything about that on the forums/blog.)
Or did I miss out on something?
9 Responses to “Less Flickr views, anyone?”
Vint, your first and last point, that you commented, could be the reason, but not the other ones, because I only “suffer” from it since last weekend.
Something must have changed at Flickr, it is the only reason I could think off. I am not talking about comments, but only views.
The eventually less comments are a result of less commenting other pictures, as you said, I think.
I can confirm that feeling of getting less views, too. A couple of weeks ago I had pics going up to 100 views in a very short time, now they hardly get there at all. Maybe my shots got worse instead of better, maybe it’s Flickr, maybe I shouldn’t have urged my friends to create own Flickr accounts and post their own pics that may disctract people from mine ;)
I think it’s the classification; for me, the plummet in view count happened when I set up the “screenshot” classification for my pictures.
Melissa you should NOT use screenshot. Use CGI/Illustration/Other. Screenshots are for showing off your Vista machine crashing, not for computer art. No wonder your count view may be down, nobody searches for screenshots.
I witnessed a small drop in views too but not that noticable. The counter is still going strong. It goes by waves of course, days I post something I can get more than 1000 hits in the same day.
Personnally I hope it’s the later because I noticed a very strong discrepancy between the global View count and the actual View count on all pictures. I remember when I reached my 25K, at the same moment I posted a couple pictures that busted over 1500 Views in the day. But the counter only reported 1000. But if they reajusted it, the global Views should increase, not decrease.
Flickr lacks decent statistics, it is well known. I’m thinking very seriously to make a Flickr stats engine that would check every picture in a stream one shot, and count the views on every picture and do the total. I think I would be surprised on how much view you get on individual pictures versus the global counter. I’m thinking of doing an incremental system that checks every day and let you view your progression. But it’s still a project, and I have so much already ^^
What’s the big hangup with picture views? Ok, it’s nice if a lot of people get to see your work, but I’ll trade 500 views for a single comment… Views only tell me the thumbnail got people curious, not what they think about it and that’s what I’m interested in.
Come to think of it … I don’t have a single pic with 500 views :-)
*waves* I noticed it too and was wondering the same things…just to say is all.
I’ve been posting a lot more photos lately, so I figured I was just getting my views distributed amongst more photos. *shrugs*
Learning the difference between “less” and “fewer” would be nice….
Mike, thank you for - besides complaining - also explaining to me what the correct use is. In Dutch we have only one word that means both ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, undependable on which ‘brand’ of word you combine it with. Hence the mistake. Still, if that is the only thing you have to comment upon, I assume the rest of the post was a great read? *grins*
Care to comment?