Hitwise: Slide Passes Flickr, Threatens Photobucket for Top Spot in NZ
The always interesting Hitwise web traffic analysts have released statistics this morning indicating that Slide.com has overtaken Flickr in at least one country, New Zealand (the birthplace of Read/WriteWeb), and has doubled its market share in the Entertainment - Photography sector over the summer.
The most recent public numbers from Hitwise on Slide's US market share were from April, when the now shuttered Yahoo! Photos, Flickr and Slide all lagged far behind Photobucket.
Back in New Zealand, though, Slide.com now trails only Fox's Photobucket in NZ, thanks largely to the company's wild success on the new Facebook platform. Hitwise says Facebook drives more than 59% of the traffic to Slide.com. Slide was one of the first companies to take the strategy of releasing lots of little mini-apps in Facebook, many of which have been incredibly successful.
Slide has raised tens of millions of dollars in VC backing. The company saw big early growth on MySpace when it hired a legion of young people to push its widgets in that social network. It's also been accused of violating the MySpace terms of service in its early days by using user credentials to autopublish to user profiles.
Unsurprisingly, Hitwise also reports that Slide.com visitors spend less time on site than visitors to either Flickr or Photobucket.
You can claim all the high-brow love of photography you want and be critical of Slide's shallow applications and base appeal - but fact is it's significant that in at least one major country online, it's beating Yahoo's photosharing service and is experiencing the kind of growth that could make it king.
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As a customer of Hitwise and an analytics junkie in general, stats like this make it fascinating to see how analytics will have to evolve to account for the new generation of the web. My own experience on Facebook has taught me that Slide has some very popular widgets. But I have a hard time seeing their bottom-line worth ever being more valuable than a property like Flickr or Photobucket. As soon as they get over-aggressive in any attempts to monetize the service people could quickly bail on them if the service remains little more than a tool with no real community or other reason to stay (something I'm sure Slide is keenly aware of and working hard to prevent.)
Metrics will most likely have to adopt a more nebulous, ad-hoc approach when dealing with the new generation of sites. Pageviews are still an extremely relevant metric for blogs and more static content sites. But Visits/Visitors is increasingly important for more dynamic sites. Likewise, visit lengths (and how engagement is determined given widgets/feeds/etc) will become increasingly important.
Major Country / photo market? I am NOT knocking New Zealand, a fine country indeed filled with bold, bright, and beautiful people....
... BUT ...
This stat seems out of any broad context. How is Slide doing in USA or UK or Brazil or Japan or S.Korea or Germany or France? Since when is being second place in the NZ market a key indicator of future prospects? Without having done any resarch yet this anecdote seems to me most likely a case where NZ has some special attribute vis a vis Slide adoption rather than the other way around.
@RS - call me crazy but I think there's a lot of potential in widgets like Slide's to monetize attention data. To sell what they see to advertisers, essentially. That's one of the things that MyBlogLog is probably doing for Yahoo! internally. Plus interstitial ads don't seem at all out of the question to me.
@Joseph - thanks. I've added a line in the post about US marketshare.