A Million Flickr Views

Flickr Spike, Why?

On Friday night, December 19, I had a big spike in traffic to my Flickr page:

I took that screen shot at 8:31 AM Saturday morning (the 20th). I’d had 16,407 views since 7 PM the might before. These days I’m running, on average, over 1000 views a day. So that’s way high, as you can see.

A Note on Time: Flickr time-stamps its viewing data with Greenwich Mean Time, which runs five hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time, which is what I’m on. So, when Flickr’s clock rolls over from 12:59 PM on December 19 to 00:00 AM on December 20, it’s going from 6:59 PM to 7:00 PM on December 19 for me.

I’ve never had a run like that before. I believe the most single-day views I’ve had before this spike was somewhere between 7000 and 8000 the day I posted my photographs of the damage Hurricane Sandy left in my neighborhood of Jersey City.

Naked Flickr Sex Erotic Bodies

I’ve been told that the internet floats on a sea of pornography. That there is pornography there, I know. About the ratio of porn to non-porn traffic, I don’t know, though I’m prepared to believe there’s a lot of porn, if not quite enough to float the rest.

But this isn’t about porn. Or, more precisely, it’s not about the sexual and erotic images, still and moving, which are for sale on the internet. It’s about images which are available free, many of which would be considered pornographic, but not necessarily all. These images are on Flickr, a social networking site based on photographs. You put your photos there so others can see them. And you look at other peoples photos according to your interests.

Flickr Naked

I joined Flickr in 2006 so I could post photos of graffiti. As I photographed other subjects, I posted them as well. But it wasn’t until a year or so ago that I realized that Flickr also had photos of naked people, some of them engaging in sexual activity. Anyone can see these photos; you don’t even be a member of Flickr. To be sure, Flickr has ways of restricting photos and there are nude, sexual, and erotic photos that are restricted. But I haven’t seen any of them. I’m just talking about the ones anyone can see – though, of course, you must be old enough, or be willing to misrepresent your age.

My basic impression of these photos is of the enormous variety. Youthful, middle age, old; varying degrees of dress; various postures; solo, couples, and more; hetero, gay, lesbian; good looking, plain, unattractive; color, black and white; technically excellent, mediocre, poor; attentive to composition, indifferent to it. Various in those and other ways.

And then there’s the matter of motivation and intention: Why are these people taking these photos and putting them on public display? I assume there are various answers to that question, but I don’t know off hand what they are. Why, for example, would a man take a snapshot of his erect penis laid over a dollar bill and covering much of it? Who’s he want to see it? What’s he expect them to think? Is he looking for feedback?

Lots of people are. This is, after all, a social networking site. You can comment on the pictures, and some people explicitly ask for comments; some even ask for dirty comments. Not only that, but you can make notes on the picture surface. You draw a rectangle around part of the photo and make some comment. Some photos have 5, 10, 20, or more notes on them, most about strategic bits of anatomy and what the annotator thinks about or would like to do with / to that bit of anatomy.

Artistic Nudes

But let’s consider a specific example. I’m not going to put the photo here because doing so would impact THIS blog in a way that I can’t control. And it’s not obvious that the photographer and model would let me do so – though I suppose I could ask. Yes, the photo is where anyone on the internet can see it, so why should it make any difference if I post it here? Well, on Flickr they’re among friends. They have some kind of relationship going with people who comment on photos there – this particular photo has over 20 comments, but it has been viewed over 1600 times (what do the anonymous viewers think?). If I were to post it here, well, this is a different place, different bunch of people, and I’m using the photo for a purpose quite different from what the photographer and model intended. In any event, you don’t really need to see the photo. A description is good enough for my purposes.

Let’s call the photographer David and the model Denise – not the screen names they actually use. David is not a professional photographer. According to his profile he’s a middle aged tradesman who took up photography a few years ago. He’s quite serious about photography and has photographed a wide variety of subjects. He’s taken many photographs of Denise, with nude and partially nude photos in the minority. She’s the only model he’s photographed in the nude. I’m guessing, though I don’t know this, that they’re lovers.

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