According to the latest data from HitWise, Photobucket, the leading photo sharing site in the United States, saw a rapid decline in its market share over the last twelve months. Photobucket commanded 36% of the photo sharing market in February 2008, but this number dropped to 27% last month. Most of this loss, according to Hitwise, can be attributed to a decline in visits to MySpace, which has always been the main source of traffic for Photobucket.
According to Hitwise, Photobucket’s market share topped out at close to 45% in February 2007. Photobucket is still the leading photo sharing site in the U.S., but Yahoo’s Flickr is slowly but surely gaining ground on Photobucket and might just overtake it as the leading photo site in the course of this year if this trend continues.
Declining Traffic from MySpace
Last July, Photobucket still got 54% of its traffic from MySpace, but last month, that number had declined to 38%. In the U.S., MySpace has now been surpassed by Facebook as the most popular social network and given how strongly Photobucket is tied to the fortunes of MySpace, we can only assume that this negative trend will continue for Photobucket.
According to Hitwise, neither Flickr nor Google’s Picasa (the number two and three in the market) get more than 6% of their traffic from social networks – instead, these services tend to rely more on traffic from search engines.
