New Sharing Statistics from ShareThis

Late last year I reported some web content sharing statistics (from August 2008) from ShareThis, the news sharing service. At the time, I was surprised by the large percentage of email and Facebook sharing and the absence of Twitter. Now, ShareThis has produced updated share percentages for January.

ShareThis Share Percentages Jan 2009

Unfortunately the variance since August reported in the following chart does not make much sense if you compare the share percentages in January and in August. Therefore it risky to make too many interpretations from this data. At the same time, its not for nothing that Gregg Easterbrook once said, “Torture numbers, and they will confess anything”. So here goes:

The rise in Facebook is no longer a surprise to me. I find myself using the service more and more to share content from around the web. I am glad to see Twitter on the list, but am still surprised the percentage is so low. AIM is also a surprise, mainly because I haven’t used the instant messaging service in about 10 years. And the percentage drops in Email and Digg (again, take the figures with a grain of salt) seem to support the idea that new social networks are beginning to take hold.

Is it even possible to make predictions for the next results? I would say no, not really, but I will give it a shot anyway. I predict Digg, Email and Technorati to decrease further, Facebook to stay the same, and increases from Twitter, Stumbleupon and FriendFeed.

UPDATE

Apparently some of the figures in the above chart are incorrect. The adjusted figures just released by ShareThis show a more plausible AIM statistic of 0.1% which seems to be more in line with reality.

ShareThis Updated Share Percentages Jan 2009