Hitwise have released stats to show that Photobucket is by far the largest photo-sharing site in the world - it has 43.84% of the market, compared to Yahoo! Photos at 18.27% and Webshots at 8.34%. The fifth company on the list is also an image hosting site for MySpace: ImageShack has 6.04% of the market. Flickr comes in at a respectable 6th place with 5.95% - but that’s way out of proportion to the amount of coverage it garners in the blogosphere. I’ve been trying to argue this point for months, but now we have the stats to prove it: PhotoBucket is far more significant than Flickr. Why? Because their strategy is better (assuming that your aim is growth).
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I agree with the very Web 2.0 concept: make an easy-to-use widget and latching on to a high growth site or sites, but the truth is it isn't clear whether or not this is a profitable strategy. The author alludes to this, but I would argue that while gaining market share is nice, profitability of the long term is what keeps it. Flickr is large enough and has enough critical mass that focusing on a better product and profitability may in fact be the better strategy. (Overall; as a traffic generator, his observation is clearly totally on point.)
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