Pink quits Instagram and leaves 12 million followers

When Instagram announced new Terms of Service two days ago, the community of instagrammers reacted with nothing less than outrage. Among other things, users’ photos could appear in ads and the only way to opt out was to delete your account.

Among the more prominent Instagram users that reacted strongly were National Geographic and artist Pink. National Geographic stopped updating its account and posted this image:

national geographic instagram

The artist Pink went a step further and has actually deleted her entire account. Before she closed her account, she had more than 12 million followers. Now that’s quite a statement.

pink quits instagram

The flood of negative reactions forced Instagram to some crisis management and the company yesterday issued a clarification intended to respond to the worst criticism. But the damage is possibly already done. Many are reporting increased and renewed interest in Flickr, which just recently launched a new and updated Instagram-like app.

And Starmatic, a similar app that also lets you import your entire Instagram library, has seen a tremendous increase in import requests during the last 12 hours.

starmatic

I love Instagram and I hope they will keep their promise to not sell user photos, so I won’t quit the service any time soon. But this could serve as a lesson to any major social network. It is not hard to copy the functionality of a social network, they are rarely unique or patented. I could switch entirely to Starmatic tomorrow if I wanted to. What I don’t want to lose is the network connections, there’s the real value. So when a large enough portion of a network decides to abandon a service, things can move pretty quickly. Hopefully Instagram has learned a lesson.

Instagram now growing faster than Flickr

Three days ago I took a look at how many new photos users added on Instagram each day. By looking at the ID numbers of the photos I calculated that Instagram had now reached beyond 500 million photos and that about 4.5 million new photos were uploaded per day. Then I found a blog post from Instagram that summarized last year and in the post it says that at the end of 2011, 400 million photos had been shared in total on Instagram. This confirms that my calculations were pretty accurate (the 400 millionth photo was uploaded on Dec 7, 2011).

If we look at the volume of photos during January 2012, users added approximately 4.5 million photos each day to Instagram. This seems to be confirmed by the statistics from Instagram, that says that the average number of photos uploaded per second at the end of 2011 is 60, or about 5.2 million per day.

Steady growth for Flickr
Now, if we look at the growth of Flickr, it seems that it continues to grow at about the same speed as it has been doing for the last couple of years. Official figures from Yahoo claim that users upload about 4.5 million photos per day to Flickr. But in reality, I believe it is slightly lower than 4.5 million. The 6 billionth photo was uploaded on August 1, 2011. Today, there are 6.7 billion photos on Flickr, which means that on average during the last 5 and a half months, users have uploaded 4.2 million photos per day to Flickr (724 million photos in 172 days).

In other words, Instagram is now growing faster than Flickr. Between 4.5 and 5.2 million per day for Instagram, compared to 4.2-4.5 on Flickr.

Here are two graphs describing the development and you can follow the links below for more stats and links to different milestones.

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instagram-1-billion-photos

Instagram may reach 1 billion photos in April

flickr-growth-2006-2012

Steady growth for Flickr as it reaches 6 billion photos

London police name and shame rioters on Flickr

In August this year, the Manchester police in the UK tweeted the names and birth dates of people who have been convicted in relation to the UK riots. Yesterday, the Metropolitan Police Service in London published photos on its official Flickr page of 64 people who had been convicted for offences during the riots. Details of the convicted include name, birth date, street/location, offence and sentence. Among them for example, an 18-year old that was sentenced to five years and ten months for violent disorder, robbery and burglary.

The photos on Flickr are published with a Creative Commons license so that anyone is allowed to share and use the images.

images of convicted uk rioters

I find this practice to be an appalling abuse of power and I hope it doesn’t spread to other parts of law enforcement. Police in Stockholm have announced they will increase its focus on social media in 2012, but I strongly believe they are more sensible than the police in the UK.

Hat tip to Neville Hobson for the link to this story.

Steady growth for Flickr as it reaches 6 billion photos

As you may know, I have been keeping an eye on the growth of the popular image hosting site/community Flickr. It turns out that in spite of new cool photo apps like Instragram and others quickly adding new fans, Flickr continues to grow with about one billion new photos per year, or to be more precise, it takes about 11 months to add another billion.

The 6 billionth photo was uploaded to the site on Aug 1, 2011 so Flickr seems to be growing at the exact same pace as it has done the last three years (see below). Photo number 5 billion was uploaded on Sept 18, 2010.

Flickr 6 billionth photo - chart

The 6 billionth photo can be was shot by Flickr user eon60 and can be viewed here.

Previous milestones for Flickr:

22 Oct 04: 1,000,000
20 Apr 05: 10,000,000
15 Feb 06: 100,000,000
22 Sep 06: 250,000,000
15 May 07: 500,000,000
19 Jul 07: 850,000,000
06 Oct 07: 1,500,000,000
13 Nov 07: 2,000,000,000
17 May 08: 2,500,000,000
03 Nov 08: 3,000,000,000
04 May 09: 3,500,000,000
11 Oct 09: 4,000,000,000
18 Sept 10: 5,000,000,000
1 Aug 11: 6,000,000,000

7th blog anniversary

Yesterday, I had a long talk with a journalist about personal branding and social media. We talked about how I started this blog and how it has developed over the years. As a matter of fact, today I am celebrating seven years of blogging on Media Culpa, which I started on Feb 17, 2004 (actually a little earlier, but those first test posts were deleted before going live on this domain).

Seven

To celebrate the occasion, I thought that I would share some small details about the past year for this blog.

  • 72% of my visitors are from outside of Sweden. During the last 12 months, the blog has gotten visitors from 162 different countries/territories, including Turks and Caicos Islands, Kyrgyzstan and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Sweden is the top country (28%), followed by USA (23%) and UK (7.1%).
  • 50% of all visits came from search engines.
  • Top referring search key words: “twitter handle”.
  • Most read post, is an old post from 2009: Strategies for choosing Twitter handle (see above).
  • Most read new post: BP oil spill and social media, which still ranks in the top 10 in Google for “BP oil spill”, between Huffington Post and the Guardian.
  • Most retweeted post (79 times): Flickr reaches 5 billion photos, which also was picked up by TechCrunch, CNN, BBC and hundreds of blogs.

If you want to follow my blog, don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or “like” it on Facebook.

Media Culpa

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Photo credit: Melanie Hughes.

Flickr reaches 5 billion photos

The photo sharing site Flickr just reached 5 billion photos this morning. Here is a link to photo number 5 billion, a photo of Woodward’s building in Vancouver, taken by Aaron Yeo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yeoaaron/5000000000/

Update: Since it became known it was the 5 billionth photo, Aaron Yeo has decided to share the Woodwards Collage picture with a CC license. So here it is:

Woodwards Collage

Despite the fact that social networks like Facebook have become popular places to share photos, it seems that the growth of Flickr continues at the same pace as during the last 3 years, adding about one billion photos per year. (Facebook claims that users uploaded 2.5 billion photos per month, in February 2010.)

I have been tracking the dates when Flickr has passed different milestones and calculated the graph below. Although Flickr seems to be handing out id numbers to each photo somewhat randomely, for example, the graph below has an id number just below 5 billion although it was uploaded after the photo mentioned above, it still seems to be pretty accurate.

flickr-5-billion

Previous milestones for Flickr:

22 Oct 04: 1,000,000
20 Apr 05: 10,000,000
15 Feb 06: 100,000,000
22 Sep 06: 250,000,000
15 May 07: 500,000,000
19 Jul 07: 850,000,000
06 Oct 07: 1,500,000,000
13 Nov 07: 2,000,000,000
17 May 08: 2,500,000,000
03 Nov 08: 3,000,000,000
04 May 09: 3,500,000,000
11 Oct 09: 4,000,000,000
18 Sept 10: 5,000,000,000

Update: Flickr has confirmed on its blog that the site has now reached 5 billion photos.