Webometric Thoughts: Average photos per Flickr Member: ZERO
Webometric Thoughts blogs that based on a random sample of 324 Flickr users that 216, or 67%, had zero photos.
If this is true that would leave you to believe that more people may be consuming photos on Flickr than publishing photos on Flickr.
From Webometric Thoughts:
“67% of Flickr members have no photos! Whilst Lotka’s law teaches us that the majority of contributors to a community make very few contributions, I was still surprised at the number of members with no photos; after all, I am not talking visitors to the site, but those who have taken the trouble to join. What is the point of joining Flickr if you are not going to put photos on the site?”
Two things that this survey doesn’t really address though.
1. Just because someone’s stream shows no photos doesn’t mean that they really have not uploaded any photos to the site. Some people will have 100% of their photos marked as “private” for friends and family only. For someone who is not their contact it will merely look like they have no photos on the site.
2. A lot of people sign up for things and then never use them. I’ve signed up for hundreds of sites in the past that I never used. Sometimes I sign up to try them out and then get frustrated when sites are not intuitive and I bail, other times I just simply lose interest.
In either case I’m not sure that all users are necessarily good representative sample for all active users.
