Another photo used in a blog post, found with Smugmug referrer stats

One of the great things about Smugmug's new stats is that they list referrers that link to specific photos, as opposed to pages.  I have been running Statcounter for some time and it does a nice job of tracking page loads, including referrer information, but of course it can't tell me anything about direct views of photos via a URL that goes straight to the image.  Fortunately, Smugmug's stats were upgraded earlier in the year and they have detailed referrer information.  Accordingly, they provide information about views of photos via direct URLs, including photos embedded elsewhere.

I have no longer have any hope of monetizing my hobby and so don't worry too much if people use my photos in their personal blogs, forum postings, or other non-commercial sites.  However, I do like to find out when my photos are used elsewhere, mainly because I am flattered that anyone found them nice enough to re-use.  I just wish people that embedded my photos would also provide a link to my site, especially the specific gallery where they found the photo, to help boost my page rankings.

Today I was looking at the referrer stats and was pleased to find that one of my Nanluoguxiang photos had been embedded in a blog entry at Sinologistical Violincellist that started out talking about Yao Ming, but digressed into a mention of a restaurant in Nanluoguxiang...

http://adamcathcart.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/yao-ming-shanghai-feel-relief/

It actually looks like a pretty interesting blog.  The author appears to be a cellist living and working in China, and many of the posts relate to the classical music scene there.

As I mentioned in a previous post, another of my Nanluoguxiang photos was used in a post at another blog, Haonowshaokao.  The author there was nice enough to also provide a link directly to my gallery:

http://haonowshaokao.livejournal.com/3734.html

Thanks to Smugmug's watermarking, you can see the name of my site in the lower left corner of the embedded people.

Looking at the referral states, There also seem to be a fair number of referrals from blogs and forums that require a login, so unfortunately I can't see any of them.

What also struck me in looking at the Smugmug referrer stats is the vast number of referrals I am getting from Chinese search sites that do image search.  In particular, as you can see below, over the last seven days, well over half (885 out of 1532) of the hits on my site, mainly image views, were generated from Baidu image search:

I guess the lesson here is that if you want a lot of hits from China, keyword your photos in Chinese, and they will be picked up by Baidu and Sohu, and you may end up with a lot of views.  Whether any of that will translate into anything useful, I have no idea.