Yahoo Photos closure bumps Flickr market share
Yahoo Photos' loss is Flickr's gain.
Flickr's market share has risen as Yahoo Photos' has dropped.
(Credit: Hitwise)Yahoo began shutting down Yahoo Photos last month, and now Flickr passed it to become the No. 2 photo-sharing site in terms of Internet traffic in the United States, according to monitoring firm Hitwise.
Flickr now has 6.42 percent of the visits to photo-sharing sites, up from 4.57 percent in March, Hitwise said.
That's a significant jump, but it's not all Yahoo might want: Flickr's 1.85 percentage-point increase was more than offset by Yahoo Photos' 2.6-point drop from 5.79 percent to 3.19 percent. And Flickr also got a boost from incorporation of its images into Yahoo's search at the end of June.
Flickr remains a distant second in U.S. traffic compared with Photobucket, which rose from 41.4 percent market share to 43.52 percent in June, Hitwise said. However, Hitwise researcher LeeAnn Prescott said on her blog, "It is worth noting that Flickr has a truly global footprint and has greater share of the photography category in other markets."
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
