Luminous Landscape Forum

The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: Stuarte on June 01, 2010, 10:12:53 am

Title: Does Smugmug really generate so many more views than Flickr?
Post by: Stuarte on June 01, 2010, 10:12:53 am
I share my photos online on two sites.   My purpose in doing so is to share with friends far and near, and to open myself up to serendipity and see what happens.

Smugmug was the one I used first, starting in June 2007.  I just used it as a photo gallery and didn't take advantage of any of the community aspects.  I didn't comment on other people's photos, and nobody has commented on any of mine.  

I started using Flickr around a year ago.  It's the site my local photographic group uses, so there's a community aspect to it as well.  We comment on each other's photos.  Since I started using Flickr more, I pretty much stopped uploading photos to my Smugmug account.  

Now here's the puzzle.  I'm  been active on Flickr and passive on Smugmg.  I know people on Flickr and I know nobody on Smugmug.  YET the site stats show that I get far more views on Smugmug than I do on Flickr. According to the Smugmug stats, in the past 24 hours or so I've had 266 views.  During the same period on Flickr, I've had 3.  Admittedly I have around half the number of photos on Flickr as I do on Smugmug, but the ones on Flickr have been much more recently uploaded.

My question is this: Why is there the huge disparity in my views between the two sites?  Especially bearing in mind that I'm active on Flickr and not at all on Smugmug
Title: Does Smugmug really generate so many more views than Flickr?
Post by: Eric Myrvaagnes on June 01, 2010, 12:15:56 pm
Here's one wild speculation: Does your LuLa Avatar reside on the Smugmug site? If so, Smugmug will get a hit everytime anyone looks at a thread in this forum that includes one of your posts. Looking at the logs on my own website I've noticed that this happens. So to get the number of "real" visitors I would need to subtract all the Luminous Landscape hits.

Eric

Title: Does Smugmug really generate so many more views than Flickr?
Post by: Stuarte on June 01, 2010, 12:27:20 pm
Very smart thinking Eric.

Unfortunately as far as I recall my LuLa avatar resides on Flickr.

Also I'm not that active or that clicked on LuLa.

But it's a smart theory.
Title: Does Smugmug really generate so many more views than Flickr?
Post by: DarkPenguin on June 01, 2010, 12:37:24 pm
Does smugmug count spiders?  The googles and yahoos of the world?
Title: Does Smugmug really generate so many more views than Flickr?
Post by: Gary Brown on June 01, 2010, 12:54:07 pm
Another possibility, like the avatar suggestion, might be if you have any Web pages that embed your Smugmug images, so that hits on those pages also "count" as hits on Smugmug.
Title: Does Smugmug really generate so many more views than Flickr?
Post by: Stuarte on June 01, 2010, 12:57:20 pm
According to the Smugmug stats explanation, they count a view when a visitor loads a photo into their browser.  So the same visitor looking at one photo medium size, then again larger and again larger, would count as three views.