What Is Noise

The first step towards getting past addiction is admitting you have a problem right?

“My name is David Fisher, and I am an analytics junkie.”

Ok, I admitted it. Let’s move on. With a Flickr Pro account you get to have a little Stats page about your photos. It’s pretty cool and useful, but it leaves me wanting so much more. What are the problems that I have with it? What more do I need? Honestly, much of the functionality of Google Analytics would be really appreciated

• A longer history: The past 30 days only isn’t really sufficient for me. I haven’t been taking photos for only 30 days. I’d like to be able to compare the response that I’ve gotten between events. These events might be months, or even a year apart. As it stands now, it’s just a pretty picture of the last month of activity.
• Variable time selection: I want to be able to select a timeframe of just a week or so. I appreciate that it shows it by “yesterday” and “all time” but I want to see things for a specific month or slice
• Comparing vs others photos in a pool: I’d like to see how much traffic everyone else has gotten about a specific tag or event. I have a “hunch” that I had the most popular photos for ROFLCon, but it’s really hard to tell. That’s a really big thing for me.
• More graphical trend information: I’m a visual person. I like to see everything that I can visually. Just the fact that I’m on flickr makes this apparent. Graphs, charts, diagrams. You can’t overload me.
• In this vein of things, I want to see referral information over time.
• I want to know some things about my viewers. Resolution, color depth, browser, time spend on page. I also want to know if they “bounced” or kept viewing more of my photos. How many unique viewers vs “hits” overall? What sizes are they viewing?
• Tell me about what I’m doing: What cameras am I using, what size am I generally exporting, what lenses am I using? Graph my EXIF metadata for me. Some of us shoot with multiple formats, cameras, etc… and I’d love to know more about my own shooting/usage and compare it against traffic patterns.
• Overlaying: I want to be able to overlay any of this data against each other. I want to see trends. Are all of my creative commons photos getting more traffic? Are the things that I shoot in portait getting no traffic? I want to know!
• A simple/advanced mode: I don’t think that everyone wants all of these. Some people are overwhelmed by Google Analytics. I don’t want to scare people off, but some of us need more power!
• I’d like to have export to CSV or XML. Sometimes I just need to export data and analyze it elsewhere.

A few things could happen here:

1. Flickr could allow the insertion of analytics Javascript into the pages on your account, and you could use some external service. I’d love to build a Flickr analytics engine/page or hell, just use Google Analytics and then hack a few extra things onto another page to deal with stuff
2. Expand their own! They have gotten some of the smoothest photo management software going and they can’t get decent analytics out there? WTF?

It kinda pisses me off that they are screwing around with Video services on flickr, when it’s clear that YouTube has that covered and it’s kinda pointless, when they should be improving the photo services. There is a reason that I still use a Smugmug account for my “professional” work.