My 10,000,000 Views on Flickr
I have been on Flickr forever. It’s launch basically coincided my my launch as a photographer. As something for business, or networking, it’s useless IMO. But it gets views and lots of engagement. Recently my photostream hit 10,000,000 views, which sounds nice, but doesn’t actually mean anything. Usually the biggest numbers are for people who take landscapes or shots of women. The reason I get relatively big number on Flickr is because of Flickr Explore. Flickr Explore is a mysterious algorithm that selects a couple hundred photos a day out of the 25,000,000 photos selected. These ‘Explored’ photos are then displayed prominently on the site every day.
I had this photo of a family running down some dunes at the Sandbanks Provincial park near my hometown of Picton, Ontario selected a couple of days ago and it got 10,000 views in a few hours. There are also the dozens of obligatory comments of congratulations, mostly from people desperate to get their photos into Explore, or for people to click on their comment and follow to their photostream. TBH, I’m not quite sure.
FWIW Here are a bunch of my photos that have made Explore
End of the day being popular on these types of forums is a waste of time. I have 125,000 followers on Facebook, it means nothing. I used to get thousands of ‘Likes’ on some photos, now lucky to get 50. But these platforms are still useful for getting feedback on images. Sometimes I will love an image, upload it and it falls completely flat. Other times I will upload something that I think is OK, and it will take off. It’s great for a second opinion. Photographers can be so close to their images, it can be hard to tell what the public thinks. This is the way.
