Over 40,000 ... and growing

In early 2006, Kevin was looking for a way to share photos taken in January at the Epiphany Party hosted at the Big Gay Frat House. A colleague recommended Flickr and he signed up on February 2, 2006.

The collection began just for photos taken at the BGFH, but it soon exploded into something much bigger. After taking a few snaps at local drag shows and club nights, he suddenly became known as an unofficial documentarian of gay nightlife.

Earlier this month while on vacation in New Orleans, Kevin broke the 40,000th photo mark on Flickr, an impressive feat for photos that are original and not filled with "net finds."

Note: if you simply hop over to Flickr right now to see them, you'll only see a small fraction of those photos. That's because Flickr requires some of the racier ones to be marked "restricted." That prevents them from being accidentally being seen by children (who cannot turn off SafeSearch) and others with more delicate sensibilities who choose not to turn off SafeSearch. To see those ones, you'll need to create a free account on Flickr and then turn off SafeSearch in your account settings.

As of today, Kevin has posted 41,051 items (all photos except for two short videos). All of that over the course of 1,312 days (approximately 3.6 years). That works out to an average of 31 photos per day, or 219 per week, or over 900 a month -- over 11,000 per year.

In that time, his photos and photostream have been viewed over 4 million times. That includes 2.6 million views of individual photos, over 983,000 clicking pages of the photostream with medium-sized images, and nearly 500,000 looking at full sets of thumbnailed images. Over the course of a typical month, his photos will be seen anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 times per day. Here's an overview:

If he were allowed to post ads on these pages (he can't under Flickr's rules) and charge an extremely modest $5 CPM, he would have earned over $20,000 in that time. Alas, he can't.

So what's in this collection anyway? What makes them so popular?

Quite a lot are of go-go boys dancing in their underwear or jockstraps in gay bars. Many are of drag shows, street fairs, fundraisers, and specific club nights. Thanks to Flickr's ability to allow tagging photos with meta-data, we can actually provide a quick overview. Note, however, that the tags have to be added either collectively at the time a bunch are uploaded, or individually thereafter. Most of the time, Kevin uploads the next day in one or more sets covering the events of the day. That makes it easier to tag things that cover the entire set, such as the name of the venue or bar, the name of the club night, and the city. For that cover a bunch of photos within a set, but which don't include the entire set (like go-go boys or strip poker), they can still be done in slightly more cumbersome bulk operations. But for tags that only occur a few times within a set, such as names of specific individuals, they're a lot more challenging to add and quite frankly are often omitted.

So while tags don't provide a 100% accurate reflection of Kevin's photos, they do provide a pretty good general overview. Here's a peek at the top 50, normalized to remove duplicates (for example, BGFH wasn't needed because we already had Big Gay Frat House):

Rank	Tag	# of times
1	San Francisco	32,521
2	gay	24,988
3	gay bar	20,369
4	bar	20,302
5	Castro	16,139
6	Gus Presents	7,162
7	The Cafe	6,296
8	go-go boys (also: go-go, go-go dancers)	5,523
9	Boy Bar	5,506
10	SOMA	4,839
11	drag queens	4,563
12	drag show	3,667
13	The Stud	3,244
14	Big Gay Frat House (also: BGFH)	3,180
15	fundraiser	2,981
16	Harvey's, Harveys	2,437
17	Monster Show	2,290
18	New Orleans	1,989
19	Trannyshack	1,748
20	gay cruise (tied with RSVP Vacations)	1,603
21	strip	1,515
22	Lucky Pierre	1,443
23	charity	1,386
24	LookOut	1,286
25	Hawaii	1,252
26	naked	1,240
27	Martuni's	1,164
28	Mardi Gras	1,158
29	stripping games	1,059
30	Girl Drink Drunk (also: GDD)	1,056
31	strip poker	956
32	Golden Gate Park	895
33	party	870
34	Caribbean cruise	855
35	Folsom Street Fair	851
36	Up Your Alley Fair (also: Dore Alley Fair)	838
37	440 Castro	824
38	Gay Pride	795
39	Epiphany	780
40	SF Boylesque	777
41	naked games	776
42	Mexican Riviera cruise	747
43	Frathouse	740
44	Oahu	736
45	CUAV (also: Community United Against Violence)	735
46	Civic Center	734
47	Folsom	729
48	leather	724
49	gay travel (also, gay vacations)	698
50	Honolulu	684

So ... which ones are the best? Well, that depends on how you want to define it, of course. Kevin has his own incomplete set of a few of his personal favorites. But Flickr also provides posters with a way to see their most popular photos, ranked through a variety of criteria:

• Views: the ones that have been individually seen the most
• Favorites: the ones that most other Flickr members have marked as their own "favorites"
• Comments: the ones that the have received the most comments from Flickr members
• Interesting: Flickr's own secret, proprietary algorithm for rating how interesting a photo is based on criteria involving weighting the number of comments, favoriting, and views, among potential other criteria.

Here's a fun chart showing the top 20 for all of these criteria. Many are restricted, so to the the full images when you click through to Flickr, you must first create a free account and then turn off SafeSearch in your Flickr account settings.

Rank	Views	Favorites	Comments	Interesting
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
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8.
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10.
11.
12.
13.
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16.
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So there you have it, the best of the best, however you want to define it. 

Rather than making money off of promoting SF nightlife, Kevin currently pays a modest $25 a year to have a pro account that allows him unlimited posting, and displays as many as he loads (free accounts are limited to displaying the most recent 200 photos). It doesn't cost that much ... but given that he's been unemployed since January, he certainly wouldn't object if someone used Flickr's "gift membership" functionality to extend his pro account, which will expire in February 2010.