Picasaweb popularity revisited

I recently compared a couple of measures of the popularity of Picasaweb compared to Flickr by looking at the number of links to the sites, and showing the Google Trends graphs which shows search queries for the two sites.

The results showed that Flickr beats Picasaweb by a couple of orders of magnitude on the link measure, though as the trends graph has no units, we can't read much into that, beyond the "Picasaweb is massively less popular" conclusion.

A number of other blogs picked up on the post, and made valuable points either within the post, or in the comments thereto:

• Googlified did a similar trends graph, extended in a couple of ways
  • showing picasaweb and "picasa web" as a single entity, to account for whether people search for this as one or two words (which made almost no difference to the shape of the graph at all)
  • adding in other photosharing sites webshots and imageshack (both less popular than Flickr) and photobucket (more popular than Flickr) for further comparisons

The comments to that post suggest that people also search for "picasa" when looking for "picasa web albums" which may be true in a proportion of cases, but I suspect that the vast majority of such searches are for the desktop application called Picasa, not the web service.  Google Trends shows that picasa and flickr are on a par in popularity as search terms.

A second comment also points out the obvious, that picasaweb is much newer than flickr, and that we should check back in a couple of years time to see how it is doing then!

• Mike DelGaudio wonders whether I asked the right question! He points out that although both sites share photos, the feature sets are not equivalent - Picasaweb is so far missing the huge social aspect that makes Flickr so valuable.

There is another trend tool available via IceRocket.  The graph it presents for picasaweb, picasa, and flickr tells a similar story - over the past 3 months picasaweb was mentioned on average on 6 blog posts per day, compared to 1900 for flickr.

A further set of hard numbers relating to popularity would be to compare numbers of photos hosted by each service, and numbers of (registered) users.  However, it's not easy to come up with accurate numbers for these.

Update: I've found how to get upload number for Flickr.