Flickr Misses an Opportunity
By Jonathan Bailey • Dec 14th, 2007 • Category: Articles, News, Prevention
Yesterday, Yahoo!’s photo-sharing service Flickr announced that they were now offering their pro users advanced statistics to help them track their photos.
The announcement has been largely well-received and the addition of statistics was one of the most-requested features according to Flickr.
However, those who are interested in using the new tool to track where their photos are used on the Web and check for violations of their copyright license will be sorely disappointed to know that this new system does not track images that are embedded into other sites.
Though Flickr has still introduced a useful and powerful system that will provide some much-needed insight for its pro members, it missed a golden opportunity to help its users, and the rest of the Internet, understand how the embedding feature is used.
Screwing the Pooch
The problem with Flickr is pretty straightforward. Even if you are comfortable with image hotlinking, as more and more people are, using an image hosting service such as Flickr takes away all control over it.
Since you don’t have access to the server or its logs, you can’t check to see who is using your content and how they are doing so. It is nearly impossible to check and see if the people who are using your images are attributing them correctly or using them in a manner that complies with your license.
Flickr, through this product, had the opportunity to put that information back into the hands of its customers. Since they run the service, it is at least physically possible for them to track embedding and display the information to its users. Since no other photo sharing service I know of does that, it would have put them head and shoulders above any of their competition.
However, for whatever reason, they did not. That seems especially strange considering that Flickr is designed as a repository for artistic work, something mentioned in their community guidelines, and is not just a generic image host.
Artists and photographers, it would seem, would have much more reason to track their content as it is embedded than those, like myself, who use photo sharing sites primarily to embed logos and screenshots.
Combine that with the linking requirement for embedded images and a strong partnership with Creative Commons and it seems only logical that there would be not only a heightened interest in embedding photographs, but an equally heightened interest in tracking and following those embeds.
This omission seems to fly in the face of those initiatives and would indicate that Flickr feels their own site really is the central offering, not the sense of sharing and community spirit.
Whether this is justified or not depends heavily upon statistics and information that only Flickr has and statistics that Flickr will now be holding on to, at least for some time to come.
Conclusions
The decision to limit stats tracking only to pages on Flickr’s site not only provides a very narrow picture of how photos on Flickr are being viewed, but misses out on a great opportunity to obverse, track and understand how the embedding function is being used.
If you want to allow hotlinking but wish to reserve some of your rights, such as attribution or non-commercial use, your best bet is to secure your own hosting account, perhaps on a cheap domain host such as DreamHost and use the server log analysis tools available to you there.
No matter what you do, be sure to follow the image fingerprinting tips I mentioned previously as no amount of hotlink monitoring, or even outright prevention, will stop people from saving the image and re-uploading it elsewhere. In those cases, you’ll need to use other techniques to track your content and fingerprinting can greatly help.
All in all though, Flickr missed a great opportunity to help their pro users not just completely track their images, but monitor their use and enforce their rights.
Hopefully, this is just an initial release of the system and that a future update may add this feature in later. However, Flickr has given no indication that this is case and it appears unlikely that it will be added in the future.
This is frustrating, but just the nature of the beast when you are entrusting third-party services such as Flickr with your precious content.
 |
Protect Your Work. Subscribe to Plagiarism Today via Email or RSS. |
Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
Email this author | All posts by Jonathan Bailey
I’ve been using blogpulse.com for a couple of years to find people who are blogging my CC licensed Flickr images. It works pretty well, not 100% by any means, but still better than nothing.
Though the new statistics thingamaboo on Flickr doesn’t track the hotlinks, it does track the clickthroughs, and since Flickr requires that all images hotlinked click through to the main photo page, it’s quite likely that someone’s gonna click through at some point and it’ll capture that data on the statistics report.
I’ve been using blogpulse.com for a couple of years to find people who are blogging my CC licensed Flickr images. It works pretty well, not 100% by any means, but still better than nothing.
Though the new statistics thingamaboo on Flickr doesn’t track the hotlinks, it does track the clickthroughs, and since Flickr requires that all images hotlinked click through to the main photo page, it’s quite likely that someone’s gonna click through at some point and it’ll capture that data on the statistics report.
Cybele: First off, that’s a neat idea about BlogPulse. I’d been experimenting with it as a way to track news I was interested in, a possible substitute for Techndorati, but it never occurred to me that it could be used like that.
Neat idea.
As far as the idea of clickthroughs go, it is a neat one, but there are some pretty big flaws in relying on it.
First, clickthru rates on even large visual elements overs in the low single digits. Sure, someone will likely click through at some point, but how long will it take?
Second, having used Flick in the past, I know firsthand there is zero enforcement of that linking policy. None. I used a plugin gallery for another site I formerly ran and the plugin author, without me realizing it, never followed those terms. I never heard, about it, even after over a hundred images, and only discovered it by accident when I tried to go to my original Flickr page.
Fortunately, that site is now defunct.
Finally, it doesn’t tell you much about how many people are viewing your image elsewhere. When trying to decide what sites to check first and what kind of enforcement to seek, that is pretty handy knowledge.
Indeed, the hyperlinking rule does soften the blow a good deal, but it still leaves a very sizable chunk of data missing. Much of it we probably won’t ever get back.
Thanks for the thoughts and suggestions!
I didn’t say I was relying on clickthrus (heck, I just got the stats yesterday), I just said that it does show it, which is slightly heartening and it goes way back in history, which I never expected. I did see a dozen or so image links to my stuff that I’d never picked up before (and they were all credited in some way).
I’d love to know the external image hits as well, but for an initial release that addresses what’s happening on the actual Flickr site, it’s certainly better than what I had a week ago.
As for the enforcement, if someone reports violations of any of the policies, they do actually take care of it pretty quickly. I’ve reported several things to them over the years and most are handled within 48 hours and all of them eventually. No, they don’t have a system that sniffs it out as far as I can tell. But a community of hundreds of thousands is a pretty good sniffing system.
There’s a huge list of comments already on the Help and Feedback forums, so I think that they’ll respond with more features at some point. (Most of all I think they’re tracking the data, which means that it is more likely since it’s there.)
True, we both are discussing a feature that is brand new. I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the heck it is going to do. Everyone’s just guessing, me included, perhaps even especially since I don’t use Flickr anymore.
I also have to agree that, for an initial release, it is pretty neat and still more than any other photo sharing site. However, that begs an interesting question in its own right. Hey, Photobucket, Divshare, Boxtr, etc. Any of you reading this? Hint. Hint.
It’s good to know that enforcement is pretty swift on their end. I’ve heard talk that since the Yahoo! merger that has been one of the things that has slid. What is your take on that?
It still seems strange that they don’t have a system for sniffing out misuse and violation of the linking rules. It would be pretty easy to do I would think. However, I doubt that automated enforcement of that rule is worth the reward of the link.
Glad to hear that there’s a lot of good feedback on the Flickr forums about this, do you have a link so I can check it out?
Here’s the official help topic:
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/61430/
Then there’s the Flickr Ideas discussions:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrideas/
More specifically this one:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrideas/discus...
I’m inclined to give them a few weeks to iron stuff out and see first how much of a load it all is and then figure out how they can deliver the stuff that people actually want.
I have 4,800 photos on flickr (over 1,600 of them are candy) so I’m obviously pretty invested in knowing what’s going on with my image. But I see far more of them taken via my own blog (based on the name of the image file).
Cybele: Thanks for the links, I’m going to go through them in just a few minutes.
For the record. Your Flickr account is easily the most hunger-inducing. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t go there for the next two months. I’m on a diet and I know your blog or your Flickr would break me a bit too easily.
Cybele: First off, that’s a neat idea about BlogPulse. I’d been experimenting with it as a way to track news I was interested in, a possible substitute for Techndorati, but it never occurred to me that it could be used like that.
Neat idea.
As far as the idea of clickthroughs go, it is a neat one, but there are some pretty big flaws in relying on it.
First, clickthru rates on even large visual elements overs in the low single digits. Sure, someone will likely click through at some point, but how long will it take?
Second, having used Flick in the past, I know firsthand there is zero enforcement of that linking policy. None. I used a plugin gallery for another site I formerly ran and the plugin author, without me realizing it, never followed those terms. I never heard, about it, even after over a hundred images, and only discovered it by accident when I tried to go to my original Flickr page.
Fortunately, that site is now defunct.
Finally, it doesn’t tell you much about how many people are viewing your image elsewhere. When trying to decide what sites to check first and what kind of enforcement to seek, that is pretty handy knowledge.
Indeed, the hyperlinking rule does soften the blow a good deal, but it still leaves a very sizable chunk of data missing. Much of it we probably won’t ever get back.
Thanks for the thoughts and suggestions!
I didn’t say I was relying on clickthrus (heck, I just got the stats yesterday), I just said that it does show it, which is slightly heartening and it goes way back in history, which I never expected. I did see a dozen or so image links to my stuff that I’d never picked up before (and they were all credited in some way).
I’d love to know the external image hits as well, but for an initial release that addresses what’s happening on the actual Flickr site, it’s certainly better than what I had a week ago.
As for the enforcement, if someone reports violations of any of the policies, they do actually take care of it pretty quickly. I’ve reported several things to them over the years and most are handled within 48 hours and all of them eventually. No, they don’t have a system that sniffs it out as far as I can tell. But a community of hundreds of thousands is a pretty good sniffing system.
There’s a huge list of comments already on the Help and Feedback forums, so I think that they’ll respond with more features at some point. (Most of all I think they’re tracking the data, which means that it is more likely since it’s there.)
True, we both are discussing a feature that is brand new. I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the heck it is going to do. Everyone’s just guessing, me included, perhaps even especially since I don’t use Flickr anymore.
I also have to agree that, for an initial release, it is pretty neat and still more than any other photo sharing site. However, that begs an interesting question in its own right. Hey, Photobucket, Divshare, Boxtr, etc. Any of you reading this? Hint. Hint.
It’s good to know that enforcement is pretty swift on their end. I’ve heard talk that since the Yahoo! merger that has been one of the things that has slid. What is your take on that?
It still seems strange that they don’t have a system for sniffing out misuse and violation of the linking rules. It would be pretty easy to do I would think. However, I doubt that automated enforcement of that rule is worth the reward of the link.
Glad to hear that there’s a lot of good feedback on the Flickr forums about this, do you have a link so I can check it out?
Here’s the official help topic:
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/61430/
Then there’s the Flickr Ideas discussions:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrideas/
More specifically this one:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrideas/discuss/72157600044271804/
I’m inclined to give them a few weeks to iron stuff out and see first how much of a load it all is and then figure out how they can deliver the stuff that people actually want.
I have 4,800 photos on flickr (over 1,600 of them are candy) so I’m obviously pretty invested in knowing what’s going on with my image. But I see far more of them taken via my own blog (based on the name of the image file).
Cybele: Thanks for the links, I’m going to go through them in just a few minutes.
For the record. Your Flickr account is easily the most hunger-inducing. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t go there for the next two months. I’m on a diet and I know your blog or your Flickr would break me a bit too easily.