The Most Popular Social Bookmarking Services

Wow, those stats really surprise me. I knew that e-mail was stil popular, but not that much. That’s why offering e-mail subscription on your blog is so important. Also, what happened to google boomarks? Its marketshare went down the drain it seems. As for people sharing more on facebook/myspace, I think that’s simply because their userbase is much larger than other social networking sites and most people have their “real” friends on their. Thanks for sharing those stats with us!

Yep, email is still the best way to share links but it will change with the new kind of social bookmarking. Digg and Delicious are just online bookmarks whereas websites like Jamespot or Twine bring a social aspect which can change statistics in next few monthes.

Looks like a major turnaround compared to previous year. Google bookmarks 3% from previously 27%, I am not sure how they have figured out this data but seems to me quite not trusty. Nevertheless it almost came to me as surprise email gosh 35%.

Gosh. I would have thought Twitter and Tumblr would have been in this list.

I also think that email is still the best way to share links….

except of course it’s not very clear how those numbers were collected, and weather or not they are measuring the same thing.

It would be one thing to have a chart of the # of links shared on each of those services now, and a year ago, but that is not what this is (even though that is implied)

It’s a comparison of the relative uses of each bookmarking service *throughout* either ShareThis or AddThis.

This means that it’s quite possible there are inherent difference between the two. ShareThis might have the same distribution they had a year ago and that might still not match up with the AddThis distribution between now and a year ago, and both of those might not match the over all usage distribution of the various bookmark services.

just food for thought.

I’m surprised the email number isn’t even higher. It’s just so darned easy and you know everyone has email as opposed to being a member of a social network.

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PS: I’m curious what tool you used to create your charts for this posting.

note: i’m assuming the charts above are referencing data on WHAT THE USER CHOSE TO SHARE, not WHAT SERVICE NEW USERS CAME FROM. (if this assumption is incorrect, my apologies)

these are likely two different things… in other words:

1) very likely people choose email to share, because lots of people have it / use it. BUT, it’s probably a “binary” share (ie, i email it to one or a few # of people.

2) otoh, it could be that a small # of options (as measured by which button was pushed) result in a large # of users (as measured by who came to the site, from where). in which case, you may discover that certain services have more bang-for-buck than others.

it would be interesting to compare data on what choices in #1 resulted in user visits in #2.

Why do you feel as if Twine or Jamespot will grow even more as we go forward? And what is the best way to use twitter effectively. I am just now learning.

nice article though.

These percentages while interesting don’t tell me the numbers – email is 35% of what exactly? And what are demographics of these numbers?

@Miles – ShareThis is not integrated with Tumblr yet.

@Chris – This chart was prepared in Excel 2007.

@Jehiah – Interesting thought. We could do that if ShareThis or AddThis ever reveal their stats in “absolute numbers”.

@Dave – Right, this is about different services that people have used to bookmark or share content on the web.

@Mary – The percentages refer to the ratio of ShareThis users who have uses service X vs all the available options.

Any word on what AddToAny’s stats are? Do they even release stats?

The %’s are interesting, but it would be nice to know exact numbers. Also, what other services fall under “Other”? Makes me wonder who is winning that race.

Hi Amit,

It seems to me that the research is flawed because it is limited to two tools that people must install on their blogs before this data is relevant to them at all (from a publisher’s perspective). Furthermore, the data may also be biased because it is limited to the habits of people that specifically use the plugin to share content. Most people I know usually ignore those plugins and share using site-specific bookmarklets to submit to a single social site, or use middle-man services to share on multiple sites at the same time (take ping.fm as an example of this service for microblogs).

As such, these are not the most popular social bookmarking services (in fact, I see only 2 bookmarking services on the list in total), but these are the most popular services as clicked through from sharethis/addthis plugins (which, as mentioned earlier, is a very specific data set).

If you look at the actual data (not limited to these two plugins), you will see that Digg with its 35 million + in traffic per month, along with 3-4 social news sites that come after it, account for most of this ‘bookmarking’ activity (especially when you take volume into account and start talking about passively sharing with large groups rather than person to person).

I love bookmarking with Firefox, delicious and foxmarks….

I use all of these to prevent loss of data in event of mozilla crash( Which has occured to me, and I lost lots of bookmarks that time) .

Now I am a bit conscious about browser crash!

Great news, i think google tags neither play a major role over here. May be social bookmarking services do quality work , one of best quality service providers is social bookmarkie(http://www.bookmarking-service.com)

The title of this post is rather misleading. Should be: Most Popular Sites for Sharing Links. There is more to social bookmarking than sharing links. In fact, Facebook is NOT a social bookmarking site, at least not in my book. You cannot tag, group, and see who else shared the same link on Facebook. And you can’t do that in email. These stats speak much more to how people SHARE content than to how they STORE content.