Photos: Facebook demolishing Flickr? - Stephen Baker

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Photos: Facebook demolishing Flickr? posted on January 24, 2010

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Detail from Christ in Limbo, by a follower of Hieranomus Bosch, Indianapolis Museum of Art (Taken last week by me and posted to my Flickr account)

Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo site, hosts more than 4 billion photos from all over the world. Sounds like a lot, and it is. But according to the Internet numbers published on Royal Pingdom, Flickr is dwarfed as a photo site by Facebook. At current rates, Facebook's 350 million users are uploading 30 billion photos a year to the site. That comes to nearly 90 photos a year, or an average of one photo every four days for every user. Could that possibly be the case?

Even if the numbers (or my calculations) are off, there's no doubt that Facebook is accumulating an immense horde of photography. It will give the company an increasingly detailed view of what the world is looking at, hour by hour. How do they monetize that? I don't know. In any case, Flickr's still a better site for photos.