The Changing Camera Market by Flickr

I just happened to take a quick peek at the cam­era stats at Flickr today. I had uploaded and explored this data on ManyEyes a years or so ago and per­haps not sur­pris­ingly noted that Canon dom­in­ated the point-and-shoot mar­ket and that Nikon and Canon were bat­tling for dom­in­ance in the DSLR market…all accord­ing to Flickr post­ings which may cre­ate some skew. Intriguingly when I took a quick look at the post­ing num­bers by cam­era today, there’s some­thing else very inter­est­ing hap­pen­ing: fewer people seem to be using the most pop­u­lar cam­era mod­els. Is the mar­ket diver­si­fy­ing on a model or man­u­fac­turer basis? If I had tuned in 6 months ago I would have seen a rel­at­ively flat trend for the past six months.
The data that Flickr is shar­ing spans the last 12 months. Although you can get cur­rent monthly usage data from their stats site in a tab­u­lar form and with decent gran­u­lar­ity, they only present the data in their chosen chart over time and for the top five or ten mod­els.
The mar­ket itself looks like this:

The trend is rather obvi­ous. A smal­ler per­cent­age of the Flickr mem­ber­ship are using the more pop­u­lar mod­els.
This same trend seems to be echoed in the point and shoot mar­ket spe­cific­ally. This charts shows a sim­ilar trend over the past year. Admit­tedly these are rather simple stat­ist­ics and obser­va­tions, but intriguing that arm­chair mar­ket ana­lysts might be able to garner some quick mar­ket pic­tures from a social net­work like Flickr. If you take a gander at the num­ber of pho­tos pos­ted over the past month for cam­eras by spe­cific makers, the top cam­eras are rising sub­stan­tially in the last part of the month sug­gest­ing a cer­tain cyc­lical nature to photo post­ing — very cal­en­darial.
Maybe I am try­ing to milk these num­bers for more than they can tell us, but over a year’s span, there might be some sig­ni­fic­ance in what we are look­ing at. I won­der what the aver­age length of own­er­ship is for a DSLT versus a P&S. Or what sort of stat­ist­ics Flickr has about long term usage by its mem­ber­ship. Do the bulk of the users find a cool tool and use it for a while and then gradu­ally decline in interest? Wat are the usage pat­terns for long-term users? A lot of this prob­ably depends on how we meas­ure Flickr’s abil­ity to keep up with the com­pet­i­tion. Non­ethe­less, even from these yearly stats, there’s an inter­est­ing trend to note.
Why did I even end up at Flickr today? Had to pop by to find my usernum­ber so I could try TiltViewer, the 3D photo browser and see how com­pel­ling it is. Its cool.