While I have been busy over the last few weeks I’ve been unable to spend time looking at the stats for my Flickr images – this is unusual because all of us at WhyDontYou towers are somewhat stats obsessed. However, I found time to catch up today and what a bit surprised.
Now there is a fairly consistent amount of views on the photos in my Flickr stream with predictable changes when I add new photos or put some effort into getting them more visibility. Unsurprisingly, almost all my visitors come from Flickr with a rare few being driven from various blogs (hardly ever here…shame on you all) or other sites. Today this consistency was there, with one exception – this image:
For some reason, this image has been getting more traffic than any other image over the last month, and almost all this traffic is coming from google images. Over the last month, 91% of the traffic to this image has come from google images (almost all using “Animals” as the search term) while a further 8% has come from Yahoo Images (even more bizarrely, this is normally from a search for “Boxing”…) with almost none coming from organic Flickr searches. I have tried both google and Yahoo searches and I cant make this image appear in the first 10 pages or so of either engine.
I find it a bit strange that enough people are searching for animal and / or boxing images to wade through pages of results before deciding to visit this one. I find it equally strange that, given the number of animal images I have on flickr, this effect seems isolated to this image. It has gone from relative obscurity (around 1000 views in total) to one of the most viewed images in my photostream – currently 5,556 views in just over a month. (Not that I am complaining but none of these people even leave comments!)
If anyone has any insight as what may be causing this, I’d love to hear it.
It’s possible that people have been searching for images of “Ida” that was the focus of a recent book (“The Link”) and several news conferences on May 25th by the History Channel and the BBC (not to mention a documentary). It’s usually described as being lemur-like, with a few exceptions with the fingers and cranium. I dunno, it’s just a thought.
Crikey – I hadn’t thought of that, thanks. For some reason, despite having followed the early furore about Ida, and her “lemur-like” status I never got round to making 2+2 = 4.
Rob, that is a million times better than any idea I have had previously, thanks.
It’s an appealing explanation, but I’m afraid it may be giving the flickr-visitors too much intellectual credit.
I have just seen a TV advert for Ladbrokes (online gambling) that features a boxing lemur…..(or some similar animal)
I think you’re onto something there Heather. For those of you who haven’t seen the advert it’s over here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2nAMPq0KZg. Your image is appearing near the top of the second page on a google image search for “ladbrokes lemur” and top for what Heather suggested, “boxing lemur” – I’m not sure how the term boxing applies to the advert though!
It could also have something to do with a video of a slow loris being tickled which has got almost 1.8 million views since april – check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLdQ3UhLoD4. However, I still can’t figure out what search terms people would be using to find your image of the lemur… nice shot by the way!