One of Barry Rithholtz’s readers created a chart of the past 100 years of housing prices adjusted for inflation and using the prices in 1890 as the baseline 100 mark.
John Gruber notes that the Youtube mobile uploads are up by 400% since the iPhone 3GS came out.
With that in mind, you shouldn’t be surprised to see Flickr’s camera popularity tracking page showing similar positive results for Apple.
While I think part of this is the ease in which submitted videos and pictures directly to Youtube and Flickr, there is a clear demographic use here. People who use Flickr and Youtube are more likely to have an iPhone than people that don’t. I don’t think that there’s any causation, but I do think that Apple benefits directly from the extensive communities built into both Flickr and Youtube. Members of these communities are going to talk about something they like, and it seems fairly reasonable to correlate at least a small part of the iPhone’s success to word of mouth recommendations resulting in additional sales, creating a feedback loop that is certainly positive for Apple’s bottom line.