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According to Hitwise, in the week of 17 June 2006, Flickr became the premier website based on share of UK visits in the Photography category. In the past three months, while Flickr's market share of UK visits has increased by 39 per cent, rival Photobucket has fallen by 17 per cent and Community Webshot's has remained flat.

Apparently, Flickr's success is down to a combination of good SEO and searches for soft-porn.

An analysis shows that Flickr received 33 per cent of its visits from search engines last week, compared to 13 per cent for Photobucket and 28 per cent Community Webshots. while there were 3,597 unique search terms sending visits to Flickr in the past four weeks, there were only 651 for Photobucket and 1,475 for Community Webshots. The top search terms sending visits to Flickr are searches for variations of the brand such as 'flickr', 'flickr.com' and flicker'. Flickr also featured highly for soft porn terms like boobs, transvestite

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and nudity - you get the idea. In contrast, Webshots only received a handful of soft porn queries.

Not that other sites are necessarily squeamish about this topic. Photobucket for example, cheerfully admits on its home page that one of the popular searches is 'Free amateur (!) porn'. However, the search term 'photobucket boobs' gives a much less err... satisfactory listing than the equivalent 'flickr boobs' search term.

However, the methods used by Flickr may yet backfire as there have already been mutterings in the US about the ease with which it is possible to find soft porn on Flickr. This has led for calls for public libraries to disassociate themselves from the service.

Flickr's success in the UK is in contrast to its position in the US where in June Photobucket ranked number one while Flickr came in at number six. Hitwise says this discrepancy may be due to something called the MySpaces effect.

In both the US and the UK, MySpace generates a large amount of traffic to Photobucket. Thus, MySpace accounted for 22 per cent of Photobucket's UK visits last week, compared with only 1.45 per cent for Flickr. However, MySpace effect is much larger in the US than in the UK. MySpace recently became the most popular website in the US. In contrast, despite the hype surrounding it, in the UK, MySpace ranked number 12 last week behind rival Bebo at number 10 so is unable to push Photobucket up the rankings as much as it does in the US.