8 year blog anniversary

Today, I have been blogging for eight years. That’s an incredibly long time and I have published more than 1,500 posts here on Media Culpa, or almost 200 blog posts per year. The first posts were nothing more than short notes, but the posts soon developed more inte longer articles.

∞

To celebrate the occasion, I thought that I would share some small details about the past year for this blog.

  • 80% of my visitors are from outside of Sweden (up from 72% previous 12 months). During the last year, the blog has gotten visitors from 174 different countries/territories (up from 162), including Greenland, Kiribati and Turkmenistan. Sweden is no longer the top country, instead USA is first (26%), followed by Sweden (20%) and UK (7.8%).
  • 56% of all visits came from search engines, up from 50% previous 12 month period.
  • Top referring search key words: “zlatan ibrahimovic twitter” and “twitter handle”. Top word previous year was “twitter handle”.
  • Top referral sources: 1) Twitter, 2) Facebook
  • Busiest day, Dec 21, 2011
  • Media attention worth mentioning are for example that I was on the front page of Swedish Internetworld and that The Next Web picked up my piece about Instagram growing faster than Flickr.

It is interesting that only one of the top five posts (most visits) has actually been published during the period. All the other four are older posts that still attract a lot of visitors:

If you want to follow my blog, don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or “like” it on Facebook.

Photo from Flickr.

Facebook is driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the new social media darling Pinterest. The online pinboard is growing quickly and according to a new report from Compete, Pinterest is also driving a lot of traffic to other social networks. People are sharing images and videos on Pinterest which in turn drive traffic to sites like Facebook. According to the State of Social Media report from Compete, Pinterest delivered 1.7 million visits to Facebook in November 2011, an increase by 62%. As a comparison, that is almost double the amount of referrals from an established site like Yellowpages.com.

In this social ecosystem, social networks in turn drive traffic back to Pinterest. It is quite interesting to see that Facebook is already driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram (0.16% share vs 0.06%). And this was before it was announced in January that Pinterest was among the sites that could start auto-update to the Facebook timeline, which possibly means that more images are now shared on Facebook than in November.

visits-from-facebook

Twitter on the other hand is still driving more referrals to Instagram than to Pinterest.

visits-from-twitter

The difference between how Facebook and Twitter drive referrals to Pinterest and Instagram is interesting. I don’t have an explanation to why this is, but one theory could be that the demographics of Pinterest users better match Facebook users while Instagram users are more like Twitter users. Says TechCrunch:

“Unlike most web startups, Pinterest’s core user base is not the typical early adopter set from the west and east coasts of the United States. While the Pacific and North East regions contained the most Pinterest users in May, now its strongholds are in the East South Central and West North Central States, such as Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Mississippi.”

According to TechCrunch, a large portion of Pinterest users in the US are 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland which may explain why some of the more popular categories on Pinterest are food, pets, hair & beauty and travel.

Another explanation can of course be that Instagram mainly is an app and that its web presence is not very good. When you click on an Instagram photo there’s hardly no way to get that user to keep on browsing on the site. You can’t even click on my name and explore more of my photos, so visits to www.instagr.am is not at all encouraged. On Twitter, Instagram photos are viewable within the site and in for example TweetDeck (but I don’t know if that counts as a “visit”).

Also, a tiny but important detail. When you tweet a photo from Pinterest, it doesn’t include the caption in the tweet, which might reduce the willingness to push the send button. Fix that, and I am sure more people will share pinned images on Twitter.

Note: Swedish readers may want to read this story about how Pinterest is driving millions of visits to a blogger.

Socialbakers Facebook report for Sweden – Jan 2012

Just like in the last report (Nov 2011) from Socialbakers, the Body Shop is the brand page in Sweden with the highest level of engagement. OKQ8 is the page with the highes response rate, followed by two Telia pages. In fact, half of the top 10 pages in regards to response rate, are telecom operators.

Vakna! med the Voice is the media page with most fans.

socialbakers-facebook-stats-sweden-jan-2012

In case you are missing a page that would qualify in the top 10 lists above, please suggest it here.

Edelman Trust Barometer 2012 says trust in social media is up

The latest installement of the Edelman Trust Barometer has now been published and as usual, it is interesting reading. This year, there have been some dramatic changes in the views of the public in most of the countries surveyed. Trust in government, business and NGO’s is declining while trust in media is rising.

Trust in government shows an exceptionally sharp drop in the 2012 Barometer, after rising steadily for four years. In Sweden (“informed public”), trust in government is quite stable, dropping only from 64% to 62%, making Sweden the market with the fourth highest level of trust in government. Trust in business is also decreasing, although in Sweden it is acutally up from 52% to 54%, possibly thanks to the relatively stable Swedish economy compared to many other countries.

If we look at different media sources, it is interesting to see the dramatic increase in trust in social media, now almost at the same level as corporate information. Note: responses are for “informed public”, i.e. college educated, high income, high media consumption.

edelman-trust-barometer-2012

Overall, there is a huge drop in trust for CEO’s while trust in pers such as regular employees and “a person like yourself” is increasing dramatically.

edelman-trust-2012-peers

In other words, there is less trust in messages communicated by CEO’s through traditional corporate channels and increased trust in messages from our peers, communicated through for example social media channels. There’s a lot more to read and you’ll find the whole presentation here below.


Instagram now growing faster than Flickr

Three days ago I took a look at how many new photos users added on Instagram each day. By looking at the ID numbers of the photos I calculated that Instagram had now reached beyond 500 million photos and that about 4.5 million new photos were uploaded per day. Then I found a blog post from Instagram that summarized last year and in the post it says that at the end of 2011, 400 million photos had been shared in total on Instagram. This confirms that my calculations were pretty accurate (the 400 millionth photo was uploaded on Dec 7, 2011).

If we look at the volume of photos during January 2012, users added approximately 4.5 million photos each day to Instagram. This seems to be confirmed by the statistics from Instagram, that says that the average number of photos uploaded per second at the end of 2011 is 60, or about 5.2 million per day.

Steady growth for Flickr
Now, if we look at the growth of Flickr, it seems that it continues to grow at about the same speed as it has been doing for the last couple of years. Official figures from Yahoo claim that users upload about 4.5 million photos per day to Flickr. But in reality, I believe it is slightly lower than 4.5 million. The 6 billionth photo was uploaded on August 1, 2011. Today, there are 6.7 billion photos on Flickr, which means that on average during the last 5 and a half months, users have uploaded 4.2 million photos per day to Flickr (724 million photos in 172 days).

In other words, Instagram is now growing faster than Flickr. Between 4.5 and 5.2 million per day for Instagram, compared to 4.2-4.5 on Flickr.

Here are two graphs describing the development and you can follow the links below for more stats and links to different milestones.

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instagram-1-billion-photos

Instagram may reach 1 billion photos in April

flickr-growth-2006-2012

Steady growth for Flickr as it reaches 6 billion photos

Instagram may reach 1 billion photos in April

Instagram, one of my favourite apps, is growing like crazy. In September last year, I noted that users had uploaded 200 million photos, which meant that the growth rate in August was about 50 million photos per month. Now, it seems that users are adding the same number in just 11 days.

According to my calculations, Instagram passed 500 million photos on Jan 2, 2012 and 550 million on Jan 13. That means that 4.5 million photos are uploaded each day to Instagram and at that speed 1 billion photos will be reached about April 20, or possibly sooner if the service continues to add new users.

If you want to check the dates of the different milestone photos used in the graph above, follow the links below:

07-16-2010: 2

11-19.2010: 5000001

02-09-2011: 25000002

04-09-2011: 50000000

19-06-2011: 100000000

02-09-2011: 200000000

29-10-2011: 300000001

07-12-2011: 400000000

02-01-2012: 500000000

08-01-2012: 525000000

13-01-2012: 550000000

Some even numbers are not available, I suspect because they are private (or have been deleted). The ID’s of the milestones have been recovered by using Statigram and Ink360.com. There’s no guarantee that the ID numbers from theses sites are an accurate reflection of the total volume, but previously this way of counting has proven to be quite accurate.

Footnote: I’m @kullin on Instagram.