Flickr - Referrers, Unknown source - What are they?

swag72

swag72

Messages
7,969
Name
Sara
Edit My Images
Yes
I like to have a gander at Flickr statistics and always look to see where the referrers are coming from. Anyway, of late I have been getting a specific % of unknown referrers.

I know that those views from search engines, blogs, TP etc show up and can be traced back to their source. I am interested where the unknown sources may be coming from.

Any ideas?
 
I had a bunch of them a few weeks ago - it turned out i'd sent a link to a mate via email of a concert photo a couple of days before. He then forwarded the link to half a dozen mates who'd been to the concert with us, who'd forwarded the email to their mates... pretty much everyone who'd clicked on the link from within their email browser showed up as a unknown source referrer. I only spotted it as they were restricted to the one particular shot :shrug:
 
Can be email browsers.. or people using browsers that hide the referring information.. such as Firefox or IE in porn privacey mode. There's a number of potential sources for these types of stats.. the Flickr help pages/discussions have covered this a few times.
 
As far as I can tell, it could be pretty much anything! I used TinEye a couple of times, but never came up with anything (I don't exactly get hundreds of views from unknown sources, but I know I have a couple of photos that get those fairly frequently).

I read the Flickr 'why are they unknown sources' or whatever it's called once and it didn't really tell me anything I couldn't have worked out for myself, to be honest.
 
It's anything where the browser doesn't supply a referring address (the page the link to your photo was clicked on).
This can come from all sorts of places:
- Emailed links
- Bookmarks
- Sites using the FLickr API to display pictures
- Applications (like the iPhone flickr app for example)

Bear in mind that flickr only logs visits to the photos page. If a site is using your image by linking directly to the JPEG file (like we do here to get images to display in the critique forums), these visits aren't logged in your stats which means you'll never know about them.
 
I get this quite a lot, some photos seem to be viewed from an unknown source regulary, if not a lot (ie 1-2 views per day, but every day). Same source? No idea. It's just a bit frustrating - I don't like not knowing.
 
Its usually when somebody clicks a direct link from an application like email, where there is no refer'er in the header, hence flickr can't tell you (or even if it was your own server)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top