Flickr Now Second Most Popular Photo Site

LeeAnn Prescott of Hitwise posted data showing that Flickr has surged to the number two photo site spot, controlling over 6% of the market share in the US.

Photobucket still leads the pack with a comfortable 43.5% share. But in the past four weeks, Flickr’s traffic grew 38%.

The reason why Flickr’s traffic has seen this sharp increase is because Yahoo is closing down Yahoo Photos, and users are flocking to Yahoo’s alternative photo sharing site, Flickr.

Goodbye Yahoo Photos; Yahoo Loves Flickr More covers the announcement that was made in May and how Danny speculated part of this was to produce exactly what’s happening now — consolidate Yahoo’s photo traffic and make it have a bigger share:

Therein lies another reason to simply kill Yahoo Photos. If a huge chunk of the people move over, Yahoo will leapfrog above the competition (according to comScore figures), giving it bragging rights during a year when it has come under fire for perceived failures by Wall Street to grow search traffic or grow revenues more of the new Panama ad system.

In March 2007, Yahoo Photos was number two with 5.8% share and Flickr was number three with 4.5% share. Now, Yahoo Photos moved down to the fifth position with 3.2% share and Flickr moved up to the second position with 6.4% share.

In addition, Yahoo also added links to Flickr photos within Yahoo Image Search. As of last week, Yahoo Images was the largest source of traffic for Flickr, accounting for 18% of its upstream visits.