I finally, after some 6 years, pulled the trigger on a 3 month Flickr Pro upgrade. Mostly, I was interested in seeing the stats Flickr provide, because without any statistics on where and when photo views happened, it’s hard to know where to concentrate effort.

Well, first off, it’s surprising how few of my initial views were from Flickr. It was also surprising how few views were coming from some rather large groups, and how many from some smaller, more niche groups. Of course the smaller groups have fewer posts and the larger groups get posts continually, so they might just be vanishing quickly into the oblivion of page 2 and beyond. Either way this is useful information telling me that many groups simply may not be worth posting into. I’m seeing suggestions that posting to too many groups may not be such a great idea, at least initially.

Secondly, a lot of views were incoming from Twitter. Suddenly, I’m looking at that social network with a whole new attitude. I link all my photo uploads from Flickr to it, but didn’t quite realize the level of click through I was having.

Thirdly, almost no views from links posted on Google+ or Facebook (my “Paul Glover Photography” page, my own personal timeline and a film photography group I post to). In light of that discovery, I’m reverting to posting the image directly on those services.

Finally, a blast from the past which I’d overlooked but is still going: StumbleUpon. I’ve had an account there for years, but had long since forgotten it. I only remembered because I noticed 500px has a direct posting link for it. So earlier today I decided to try adding a handful of photos to that, from both Flickr and 500px. One photo on Flickr, a recent favorite of mine (my Blue Ridge Parkway thistle from the previous post here) had been languishing at 149 views with only a half dozen in the last month. Within 30 minutes of posting to StumbleUpon it had jumped up by another 86 views. Other photos saw similar bumps on Flickr, interestingly enough the bumps in viewers were much less marked on 500px, but still a noticeable difference.

Now, I’d perhaps question the “quality” of these views. None resulted in any comments, faves or votes added. But it’s inbound traffic, and that’s never, ever a bad thing.