the transition to digital journalism

By Paul Grabowicz   ·   Updated May 23, 2013   ·   Print Print

Photos and Photo Slideshows

The popularity of online photos can be measured by the growth of the Flickr photo sharing website. Launched in 2004 and now owned by Yahoo, Fiickr reported in September 2010 that it had passed 5 billion photos uploaded to its site (although that isn surpassed by the more than 15 billion photos Facebook has reported having in its database).

Photo galleries and photo slideshows have proven to be especially popular at online news sites.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that photo slideshows were accounting for about 10 percent of the website's total pageviews, according to a MarketWatch story (note: each photo clicked on can count as a pageview, accounting for some of the large number of pageviews for photo slideshows).

The Mansfield News Journal similarly found that visitors to its website spent the most time looking at the paper's online photo galleries..

An example of a successful photo gallery was msnbc.com's "The Clarks: An American story of wealth, scandal and mystery,"  which got 78 million page views by 2.2 million unique vistors and generated 500 emails from viewers. The average viewer spent 13 minutes looking at the photos and reading the story  (the story was done by Bill Dedman, who attended the Knight Digital Media Center multimedia training workshop in January 2008).

A photo essay on Buzzfeed, "21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity," got 10.4 million pageviews

Readings and Resources

Presentation Links - Digital Transition

Presentation Links - Picking Media

Filed under: Reporting