You may have seen the AddThis buttons on blogs at some point while surfing the web. It’s a simple, free widget blog owners can add to their site that shows a number of bookmarking options at the end of a blog post (there’s also a feed reader widget for easy RSS subscriptions). Readers can bookmark the post on Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks, Bluedot and other services with a single click. As an example, we’ve added an AddThis button to the end of this post.
The service launched in October 2006 and announced that the widget was being served over 1 million times per day last month. Tomorrow they’ll announce that they’ve reached the 2 million milestone.
If you’re interested in adding the AddThis widget to your site, the customization tool is here.
AddThis is gathering some very interesting data that can form the core of a business model now that they have fairly deep penetration. They’re releasing some of this data tomorrow - showing the top bookmarking services and feed readers where their users store data (see the graphs below). Given that AddThis also sees what stories people are bookmarking, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine other things they could do with all of this data.
The top bookmarking services, after the browser feature itself (”favorites”) are del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks, followed by Digg and Yahoo My Web. No surprises there. The top feed reader by a large margin is the much improved Google Reader, which is more popular than Yahoo and Bloglines combined. I am surprised at that - Recent Feedburner data suggested Google Reader was doing very well, but not as well as the AddThis data suggests.
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good idea. but how is the revenue model?
there is none. But I like that they’re gathering all this data. Something can be done with that down the road.
Of course the revenue model is monetizing the data that they get.
This can be done automatically.
AddThis.com is a simple idea which adds value easily.
I was waiting for such a service because I don’t have the time to do all that by myself.
A great service. Reminds me a little of good old (and probably dead by now) feedpass.com since it provides a better landing page for feed subscribers. It reminds FeedBurner in the revenue model though (they will soon start charging for data).
All in all - thumbs up for them.
I think the lack of income is ok for now as long as they can cover the overheads, as they can add different income options in the future and even sell the service.
Hey, just thought this was going to happen eventually, sobody would consolidate all those widgets. But how many and why? Not sure about the revenue. I think they are just developing an asset they can sell. When it stops becoming about the revenue, then you know we are about to get into a bubble.
I love this forum because people so often ask the questions that I would. With this post, however, I actually agree that I’m not as worried about the revenue. So many companies these days play what I call the “YouTube Lottery.” Everyone knows about the crazy money YouTube got, but not much is written (even on TechCrunch) about the 100s of companies that made it nowhere, They didn’t win the lottery the way that YouTube did.
I don’t know anything about the background of AddThis, but I have a hunch they don’t spend too much money, and they do one really handy thing. They probably won’t win the lottery, but they’ve got a great chance to have a good payday someday soon.
With tons of available social booking services, I wonder wat will be the difference between them actually. I need to try them out!
Providing a service with lots of notoriety is very valuable. Think of it like this, the founders can now put this on their resume and boost their prospects for funding and success with their next start up.
Saying you are going to monetize information is much easier than actually doing it. Good luck to them.
Cool widget, it’s made life a lot easier for me. I had planned on adding these social bookmarking links to a new version of my site I have in development, but in five minutes I’ve been able to add it to key pages of the existing site. The stats are a nice bonus, I wouldn’t have thought of that.
I wish it didn’t redirect back to the article after bookmarking though, as it’s in a pop-up. Perhaps it should stay at the bookmark site account page (or default page)?
I wish it didn’t redirect back to the article after bookmarking though, as it’s in a pop-up. Perhaps it should stay at the bookmark site account page (or default page)?
or just close itself?
In your post, you say they will release some of the informations they have about the use of their service.. I was wondering where will we be able to see it?
Thanks
I’m not really all that surprised that Google Reader is getting so many hits. Over the last few months, I have seen Google’s Reader and blogsearch.google.com bubbling up the charts on my Web stats. As for the “Add This” button, it’s a great thing and helps you avoid badge hell on your blog. Bravo to its creators. As long as it continues to be funded, I don’t care how they monetize it.
The early discussion is the comments here is interesting to me, as it relates to a revenue model.
As we see pressure in the public markets, crowding in the Web 2.0 free-widget world, and an increase (I predict) of TechCrunch Deadpool inhabitants, I’d like to see more commentary on the following:
- What ‘felt need’ does this company / product fill,
- that is differentiated enough to switch to alternatives / habits,
- that someone is willing to pay for,
- that covers estimated burn rate.
Ultimately, does company X have a chance of hitting profitability?
IMHO, the only exception to a pragmatic view that a business should aim to become self-sustaining are heavy IP bets (a la Google many years ago) in a huge market. Products like this one don’t seem to fit in that category.
I actually think the most interesting part is how big “other” is on those charts. Almost a fifth of the social bookmarking is going to places other than the marquee names.
It says that either their data collection is flawed, or the market is still really fractured, and there’s room for another big player or two.
My answers to
1.) Avoiding lots of bookmark and rss feed buttons, thereby saving space. Avoiding to advertise bookmark and rss feed sites with their logos.
2.) First mover (AddThis.com) is used on most websites. No need to change for website admins. First mover can easily add additional features to keep their users happy.
3.) Interesting data analysis is always a good buy.
4.) As long as the company is run by one person there is no burn rate after monetizing the data.
5.) Yes, actually AddThis can already monetize the data which it has gathered. It is used by two million users already. All this data would make the company profitable immediately.
Okay. I think feedburner can easily compete with this widget service since they already have the reach and a similar service though not a collective offering like what AddThis is doing.
I would’nt be surprised if we see feedburner taking a similar route soon.
Cheers
Although it’s still under active development, Shareomatic! (http://shareomatic.com) provides almost the same service to it’s users, but it stays out of your way. Especially useful when you use more then one service.
I have a question not necessarily on topic but…. does anyone know of a paper or article on what the tipping point is between viewer numbers and ad revenue? At what point in viewership numbers does the amount your adspace is worth exceed bandwidth/operating costs? Of course bandwidth and operating costs are variable but roughly speaking, how does the value of adspace track with viewership numbers? I’m not asking this from a widget provider’s perspective but from a pure content provider’s, user generated or otherwise. I’ve managed to find some relevant information on google but alot of the information seems to be coming from SEO operators who of course have their own agenda.
“Yes, actually AddThis can already monetize the data which it has gathered. It is used by two million users already. All this data would make the company profitable immediately.”
Okay. Then is the company profitable? There seems to be the assumption that a large audience can be easily converted into cash. It’s usually not that simple. I’m not doubting that there could be some valuable data here, but people seem to be overoptimistic when it comes to what it takes to sell data (and advertising). Companies looking to buy access to data and to purchase advertising have A LOT of options.
As a business, I think this might have some potential for an individual or small team, but their site has a form for “Investors” so who knows what they’ll try to do.
By the way, I think the slogan “May the social force be with you” might be the worst Internet startup slogan ever.
People, the widget is not “being used by two million users already”. The post indicates that it was being served _ million TIMES per day. Page views/hits does not equal users.
It’s easy to get a lot of distribution for a nifty widget if it adds value (and it seems this one does). I’d be more interested in the number of blogs that are distributing the widget, click-through, and conversion rate.
So the idea now is to Get funding in the millions to develop something that will take years to just collect the data, to even be near a buisness model?
- How Bubble’ish ! - Getting millions in Pre-Funding, raises the level of expectations for the real funding amounts.
- This is soooo a bubble.
I have added the ShareIT wordpress plugin. Which is pretty simple compared to AddThis. For me, the ShareIT plugin works just fine
ShareIT http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
My site has an example of it http://www.sharepointbuzz.com
Hi,
there needs to be a clarification, there is not 2 million users, its 2 million times served. A single blog post may have had many users use the addthis feature.
I offer different solutions for the Joomla CMS, one similar to the versions found on most blogs that lets you bookmark individual sites and an admin version that allows multiple articles to be bookmarked to multiple sites simultaneously. Similar to OnlyWire.com, except it is a backend component for Joomla.
Gutted that addthis was released as I was in the process of something similar, however it is great to see the response it has got and the vouch of confidence from users.
I say this because I have something in the pipeline that I think you will like as a social bookmarking widget and it will use the power of Joomla CMS and combining a new concept that is causing a stir on the web (under wraps for now), however the service will be available for all sites and blogs. Watch this space!
will this remove the 5ish different “add this” buttons? or create more?
Usage data is extremely biased because of default subscriptions.
John Battlele for instance reported 10K Rojo subscribers, which is great, something like 20% of his readership.
With my own subscription approaching 500 subscribers, you would expect me to have 50+ Rojo subscribers based on that data.
I only have one Rojo subscriber
The recently released data from Feedburner didn’t take into account these default subscriptions, and truthfully it would be hard to monitor.
Real subscriptions, where someone actively decides to subscribe to a site after visiting it are something totally different.
Jeremy from B5 media placed Google first for every market sector by a long way.
My own stats place GR first, and email subscriptions to feeds second.
One significant recent change seems that from Feb 22nd Firefox Live Bookmarks seems to have been reported differently, though that didn’t generate any headlines.
To #4 Shokal: Feedpass.com is still very much alive and growing every day. We do provide a superior user experience to AddThis.com, especially for readers that might be new to bookmarking/tagging or RSS. It’s interesting that Michael Arrington is so positive on this story and was so negative on Feedpass. He likes the fact that Addthis.com is capturing subscription data for a future revenue model, while our current revenue model (adsense) was something he found troubling. We later decided to eliminate the ads from the basic Feedpass service and have been developing some additional ideas to generate a revenue model for certain users. Congratulations to Addthis.com for a decent TechCrunch review. Like one user said above, two million widgets served does not equal 2 million views per day. (:
Well, I think the bottom line is many of us wish we’d thought of something like this
It’s a money-maker for sure. Failing that’, it’s one cool project considering all the data it will collect!
Seems like a good idea, I hate spending the time putting technorati tags, digg bookmarks, etc. after every post…but I tried to add the tool in typepad and it doesn’t work for me. Goes directly to a blank page after it lists the available bookmark options. Anyone else having these problems?
I think this idea is brilliant. They are aggregating in real time the social bookmarking/news sites with a simple and inexpensive solution. If they get enough traction they could easily create their own destination site. It could be like seeing what is popular at all the social bookmarking/news sites at once. The ultimate buzz page. That could make a great site, get tons of visits and monetize very nicely since all the content would be free. I think that the upside of aggregating the social news/bookmarking sites with an inexpensive solution (that is gaining traction) is worth the funding necesary until they can monetize a possible destination site.
Thanks Michael for the great review, and everyone for all the great feedback .
Clarification. 2 million is the number of widgets served each day by AddThis.com, and 100 million is the number of widgets we have served to-date (since October). We currently have just over 1/2 million users.
Our business model is actually an elaborate multi-stage process which will start by offering a premium service with valuable information to web publishers. The current services will remain free.
We won’t go into any details about the other stages but we can safely say they do not rely on adsense, bubbles, or acquisitions.
Interesting widget and nice idea. I am pretty sure that with the data they have, monetizing the model will not be much of an issue.
What about this:-
http://www.ifeedreaders.com/chicklet-creator/
and this http://www.ifeedreaders.com/social-creator/
Alex King has http://alexking.org/blog/2007/01/25/share-this-14 too.
Alex King has http://alexking.org/blog/2007/01/25/share-this-14 this too!
The concept devised by addthis is no doubt ideal considering the current trends of usage of social bookmarking sites. The model is targeted for beginner/advanced users. They also deployed a very good PR campaign at the outset. There are others (including myself) simulating similar services, however addthis executed the rollout in a strategical business methodology to captivate a wider audience so quickly. I implore them for using a good PR campaign to escalate the business so rapidly. Data is and always will play a crucial role in the decisions made by business models to determine market trends. My predication is an ‘Alexa’ type model, (Hugely relied upon, grossly misunderstood LOL).
Add to Any - http://www.addtoany.com - has been around way before this and I think it still dominates the above.
Why I like it:
No distractions
No revenue model (yet it says it will be around “forever”)
ALL services are listed (not just social networks)
Instant search
No user signup
It does one thing, and does it very well
The numbers in that screenshot look a little surprising to me. Google Bookmarks is as high as del.icio.us? I don’t think Google Bookmarks is that popular, is it?
Dear sir /madam,
we are join in your scheme .please reply
raj.
Looks nice but whats the point if you cant access data quickly.http://www.populardownload.net
Interesting widget and nice idea. I am pretty sure that with the data they have, monetizing the model will not be much of an issue.
I use that in my portal. http://www.tao01.com
It is a good tool.
The widget is cool and with such a large uptake - much like Google- they will be able to add revenue streams. The questions is which ones, how and when?
文章好啊。我转载一下。是不是博主原产的啊。用不用注明出处.
thank you for news
I love this widget… it’s just so good.