Blogs Boost Photo-Hosting Site Traffic

Posted on September 15, 2005

The popularity of blogs is driving traffic to websites that offer photo-hosting according to a Nielsen/NetRatings study. InformationWeek has an article about the new study.

Since the beginning of the year, traffic on image-hosting sites overall has shot up 406 percent to more than 14.7 million unique users, Nielsen/NetRatings said. The number of people using the sites represents 10 percent of the total U.S. Internet population.

The top referring sites for the top 5 photo-hosting sites were blog-hosting service providers MySpace.com, Xanga.com, LiveJournal, Blogger and Microsoft's MSN Spaces, the research firm said.

Sites like MySpace.com and Xanga.com show that the blogging boom is also related to the boom in social networks, which are used for activites like dating and networking. Teens are using blogs and social networks to interact, share information, find dates and goof off so it is no surprise that the study found that teenage girls and boys were the demographic that was the most active in using photo-hosting websites.

Girls between the ages of 12 and 17 were the biggest users of photo sites, accounting for 15 percent of the total number of users, Nielsen reported. Teenage girls were two-and-a-half times more likely to visit an image-hosting site than the average user.

"It's not that incredibly surprising," Gibs said of the use of photo sites by teenagers, who have been quick adopters of the "fun element of blogging."

To some extent, teens are copying celebrity-magazine photos that are surrounded by text giving a description of what's shown, Gibs said. Many teens post pictures of places they've been, as well as of themselves and friends.

So far it is primarily teens on the social networks that use blogs as a dating tool.

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