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"Flickr is now the UK's number 1 photography site, with the biggest gains being soft porn searches, reports Hitwise.  In the week to 17th June 2006, Flickr moved to the top spot for market share of UK visits, above Photobucket, Webshots and ImageShack.  Flickr now has 11.57% of the market, against 8.67% for Photobucket and 8.57% for Webshots.  What's more, Flickr's market share of UK visits has increased by 39%, while Photobucket's has dropped by 17%.\nBut despite Flickr's highbrow image, the source of that traffic is dubious.  Flickr received 33% of its visits from search engines last week, with the top terms being the company name, and the other big gainers being soft porn terms like \"boobs\", \"nudity\", \"transvestite\" and some less tame queries, too.  Webshots, by contrast, only received a handful of soft porn queries.\nHitwise also have a theory as to why the UK market is so different to the US market: MySpace.  MySpace is a huge source of traffic for Photobucket in the US, where it holds the number 1 spot against Flickr at number 6.  But while MySpace accounted for a large amount of Photobucket's traffic in the UK (22% of Photobucket's upstream UK visits last week), MySpace is less popular in Britain.  Bebo is the biggest player on the UK social networking scene, but Beboers aren't regular users of Photobucket.\nMeanwhile, Piczo is actually a bigger player than Flickr in the UK market, but it appears in the Net Communities and Chat category, rather than Photography.\n(via)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/08/31/soft-porn-makes-flickr-uks-number-1/>