Flickr's readership . . .

[Philip]

Amusing story.

I posted to Flickr this morning a picture I took yesterday of some small animals living in the water next to our weekend-get-away house. It's a nice enough picture but when I saw the viewership numbers jump up rapidly I was surprised. I thought, "What? This made it into Explore??"

But I realised when I searched the Stats on the picture that it wasn't Explore. It was the fact that one of the animals is a so-called "naked pteropod" and that word "naked" drew in over a hundred people in an hour. They were all searching for naked things, probably not pteropods.

Naked pteropod

[PFMcFarland]

It's all in the tagging.

PF

[Philip]

That's right. Over the ten years or so that I've been using Flickr, I've had fun putting in tags to see what kind of traffic the tags draw in. The number one kind of traffic is certainly driven by people's desire to see women's breasts. Anything tagged like that, even with spelling errors, will draw in the gawkers.

[melek]

See - sex still sells.

I knew this guy who had a less-than-scrupulous person create a company website. He embedded into the HTML links to Miley Cyrus, Beyonce and a bunch of other female celebrities. The links weren't visible but apparently got scooped up by search engines.

Traffic rose sharply, and then the site was "black hatted" and then the site stopped showing up at all in search results. And site traffic fell off the map.

[Philip]

Ya can't win for losin'.

[Bennybee]

Ha! LOL. So that's why my pix don't get many views on Flickr... !
I am no good at these things.

[PFMcFarland]

PF

[Brazile]

Yeah, it's pretty amusing/irritating. If I happen to mention my wife (as in, "my wife gave me this camera") the view count skyrockets. Sigh.

Robert

[LarryD]

Another funny thing is to add Pepsi as a tag. For some reason it makes the counter jump. Also Gay, Putin and "North Korea."

[Philip]

Wow.