Photobucket Hit 30 Million of Registered Users on Friday. Are They On Top of Photo Hosting?

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After the post Photo Searching and Storing: Who???s On Top???published by Paul Glazowski??I have had a chance to talk to representatives of Fotki.com and Photobucket. I received an email from Photobucket where they attracted my opinion to the fact that Photobucket was actually much larger than Flickr in terms of daily unique visitors:

While Alexa shows even a better reach for Flickr:

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So yesterday I was informed by a marketing manager of Photobucket that they had finally reached the milestone of 30 million registered users. In fact, their ‘About’ page still says:

Photobucket was named the fastest growing site of 2005 according to Nielsen/Netratings and now ranks as a Top 100 site by traffic. Currently, Photobucket has over 28 Million users growing by over 65,000 users per day.

And the mentioned growth rate has finally brought them to the impressive figure of 30 million. And that really is impressive compared to the number of registered users of Flickr: although I have not found any official information, all the blogs mention the 1.5 million as of this September.

So what???s the reason for this leadership in terms of registered users? Photobucket argue that they really offer one of the most simple and reliable services for sharing and publishing of visual content online. And the word publishing seems to be of higher importance here. Images and videos can be directly linked from Photobucket to any site, including MySpace, eBay, LiveJournal, Xanga, Friendster, and Neopets. Thus Photobucket is widely used by MySpace users and various bloggers. And it is no doubt that MySpace is a great place to spread word of mouth and bring more users when you give people a nice tool to help communicate there.

My conclusion? It seems that Flickr is actually a website of destination for many Internet users, while Photobucket is used more like a service to avoid uploading photos multiple times to different websites. That’s the reason for lower pageviews of Photobucket with such a high number of users.

And I simply don???t know the reason for all the fuss about Flickr (tell me if you do) with its reported 6th place among top 10 photo sharing websites (as of June, no later ratings available) while Photobucket actually dominates the market. So who do you think is actually on top: Flickr with its tremendous number of pageviews or Photobucket with its obvious domination in terms of the number of registered users?