In addition to publishing Street View Tours for businesses I will occasionally publish my own personal panoramas to Google Maps. There are a number of 3rd party websites where pano photographers can publish and showcase their work or a client's 360° virtual tour. I have spread my personal portfolio across a number of these websites. Primarily on 360Cities.Net as they are/were (before Google) and still are the most predominate 360° publishing platform and repository for panoramic imagery in the industry. Some of the others include ViewAlt, RoundMe, Spinattic and the IVRPA (International Virtual Reality Photography Association) website. 

Google began enabling users to upload 360° photos to Google Maps several years ago. One of the first personal panoramas I published to Google was a pano of a group of Google Trusted photographers that had met in Las Vegas for the 2014 IVRPA conference. 

Group of Google Trusted Photographers in Las Vegas 2014. That is me in the middle with the remote in my left hand.

At that conference, Evan Rapoport (Product Manager for Google Maps) gave a presentation. He said something that really floored me and has stuck with me ever since. Evan stated that Google Maps had 1 BILLION (that is with a B) monthly users. That is a lot of eyeballs looking at Google Maps every month. You can watch his presentation here on YouTube. For whatever reason, Google does not give us statistics on the number of viewers for the business Street View tours we publish. They do however provide us with "views" of individual photos and panoramas published to Google Maps. I was curious to see how many views my panos would get so I published roughly 50 panoramas over a period of about a year.

I was surprised to received an email from Google the other day with the subject line: "Your photos reached a new record on Google Maps"!

Wow Really?

"Your photos are a big hit! Your photos helped people over 2,500,000 3,500,000 times (updated 9/2016), a new record for you on Google Maps."

2,504,539 to be exact.

Some of my images having been view 250,000 times!

and one of my most popular photos for the week was that group shot I took with my fellow photographers in Las Vegas. That panorama was viewed 8,278 times in the previous week, 204,970 times in total.

The point of this post is that even though Google does not give us stats on the tours we create for business, it is pretty safe to assume that those that have Google Street View tours are being viewed by a lot of people.

Does your business get the visibility on Google it deserves? Call me at 860-309-9885 and I'll make sure it does!

View my personal Google Maps panoramic portfolio.