The thoughts of a web 2.0 research fellow on all things in the technological sphere that capture his interest.

Sunday 6 April 2008

Average photos per Flickr Member: ZERO

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?

Data was collected about the number of photos for 324 randomly selected users. 216 had no photos, an additional 58 had less than 20, with only 50 having over 20:


Really I should have a look at whether these missing users are active in other ways, (e.g., members of groups, leavers of comments), but this was little more than an aside as I spend my time messing about with Python. I have now loaded Python on my main computer as well as my Eee PC, and can barely believe how easy it is!

Labels: , ,

posted by David at

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

you should learn more about flickr. a lot of people have their photos set to viewable only by family & friends (this was the default for people who transferred from yahoo - c1.5 billion photos)

7 April 2008 at 08:55

 
Blogger David said...

perfectly valid point...I should have stated 67% have no PUBLIC photos (but in my defense I pointed out that it was little more than an aside).

Whilst there are lots of people with private photos, you have to wonder whether they are really getting into Flickr spirit (whatever that may be). As someone says in a Flickr discussion about this post (http://tinyurl.com/6eb5yr):
flickr is a photo-sharing site and I don't like trolls.
...but that is a whole different conversation. In future I will remember to take into account, and mention, PRIVATE and PUBLIC.

7 April 2008 at 11:18

 
Blogger Mark said...

Median, not average!

7 April 2008 at 11:23

 
Blogger David said...

OK, average can be calculated in a number of different ways, and when I stated "Average photos per Flickr Member:ZERO", I was thinking of the mode. For the data I collected:
mode = 0
median = 0
mean = 22.48
Over 85% have less than the mean 'average'.

7 April 2008 at 12:15

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home