Comparing "AddThis" to "ShareThis"
There are a couple of really great tools you can use on your Blog posts. One is Addthis.com and the other is ShareThis.com. Both have some great features for the growing Social Bookmarking phenomena. I wanted to share them both and at the same time get your opinion as to which is better and why. Here’s a conversation I had with Zoltan from RealBird about ShareThis. I currently use Addthis, but am considering a change.
Quote from Zoltan:
Brad – I saw that you are using AddThis on your blog. Many large blogs have addthis.com like Techcrunch and many large ones have ShareThis like Mashable, Problogger and others. They are direct competition to ShareThis. I was using them as well on some of my sites, but I switched to ShareThis for many reasons:
- My personal (!) preference – i like the design, the button (especially the rotating icon) and the overall implementation better.
- When I deployed them on the RealBird listing sites (10,000+) ShareThis was very eager to help and assist.
- Has a neat javascript API, which helped me with some of the non-trivial (AJAX) implementations, where the Url to share changes and I need Javascript to update the button’s parameters on -the-fly.
- ShareThis has a built in email sharing as well – which turned out to be the most used sharing mechanism for some of our deployments according to ShareThis statistics.
- The word “Share” implies more, than “Add this” for consumers. ShareThis also allows you to use the code with any custom links, buttons and HTML objects through their javascript API.
- ShareThis raised a lot of money, which implies to me that they are well-positioned to be around for a longer time and should be up for something big. How can they justify raising $21 million otherwise ?
So which is it going to be? I like the 6 points made from my friend Zoltan, and I am heavily leaning toward the ShareThis option. Do you use these tools? Are you sharing and Social Bookmarking? What’s your take on these two competitors and their products? I’m always looking for better ways to help readers and Bloggers get the most out of their online experiences.
Jay Thompson
Posted at 13:55h, 07 AugustI’ve tried both on my blog and to be honest, found they occasionally bogged down and affected page load performance.
I’ve since installed the Sociable plug-in and have been pleased so far. (http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/)
It should be noted that I used both AddThis and ShareThis some time ago and they may have resolved some of the issues I experienced. ShareThis did have some cool tracking/stats features. Between teh two you mention, I prefer ShareThis.
jeremy
Posted at 14:20h, 07 AugustHavem’t tried either yet…I need to get my butt in gear with some of this stuff!
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 14:38h, 07 AugustJay – great feedback. I’ll check out Yoast for WordPress as well. Thanks. BTW – It was Great to meet you in SF at Inman.
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 15:39h, 07 AugustJer – get your butt in gear! lol~
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 15:42h, 07 AugustI just had this information sent to me from ShareThis:
“We’ve recently released some new features that we think you’ll find exciting. We’ve added both Sphinn and FriendFeed to the Social Web Tab. Special thanks to all of you who’ve submitted requests for these two great services.”
If you’d like to submit a social web service to be placed in their ShareThis widget, go to sharethis.com, and fill out their submission form.
David Mackey
Posted at 19:38h, 07 AugustI’m working on deploying ShareThis on my site right now….Unfortunately there appears to be an issue if your title/content contains any single quotes. See http://forums.sharethis.com/topic/how-to-escape-single-quotes?replies=2
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 21:47h, 07 AugustDavid – I found a couple issues myself with adding the ShareThis widget to my Blog and individual posts. Zoltan is looking into it for a resolution. Always good to hear the Good, Bad, and Ugly about these things, isn’t the internet a wonderful thing? Thanks for sharing that link and information.
Zoltan Szendro
Posted at 11:14h, 08 AugustIt is true, that since ShareThis uses more complex Javascript for implementation, there can be some conflicts with the host environment such as the one mentioned by David above. Hopefully, these are easy fixes by ShareThis once they receive the bug report.
A few more things I like about ShareThis:
Color theming allows seamless integration into any UI design. In most cases it does not matter, but for some, this can be crucial however.
ShareThis.com also allows sharing not only through email but through IM and SMS ! I just tried the SMS sharing and I received the link and custom message within seconds on my phone. AddThis currently seem to promote social bookmarking only, while ShareThis took it beyond bookmarks and provide universal sharing (including bookmarks, email, IM, text messaging etc.)
As we talked about it with Brad, on RealBird, email sharing is still the most popular way for people to forward the information, especially when they want to share info with a selected group of people as opposed to promoting it to the general public. ShareThis saves a few clicks for consumers by providing a compact email utility within the widget.
Online sharing has 3 main categories:
1., Online bookmarks – saving information for future, personal use – not necessarily sharing with others
2., Social bookmarking – the intention is to share information with the general public
3., Sharing with friends – sharing with a group of people or individual. Email still seems to be the most popular method for this
ShareThis provides tools for all 3 categories, while AddThis focuses only on 1 and 2. This was one of the reasons we selected them for all of our property websites. In our case, most sharing activities falls into category 3 above.
— Zoltan
RealBird.com
David Mackey
Posted at 12:29h, 08 AugustI was able to fix this issue in my instance since my system uses the Smarty/Template-Lite templating engine. It was a simple | escape to tell the templating system to replace special characters before passing off to ShareThis. Its not working great.
Zoltan Szendro
Posted at 15:28h, 08 AugustLooks good David.
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 16:56h, 08 AugustZoltan – thanks for a wealth of information. Looking forward to diving into this further now. I like some of the features you mention and your comparisons. Great stuff my friend, thanks. 🙂
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 16:58h, 08 AugustDavid – did you mean it’s now working great or not working great. Classic example of a typo messin with someones head. haha! Based on your comment and Zoltans response, I’m assuming you meant “now”. I’ll have to check it out, thanks.
David Mackey
Posted at 18:12h, 08 AugustYeah, sorry about that. It is now working great. 🙂
Zoltan Szendro
Posted at 22:00h, 10 AugustBrad, Thank you for including my “likes” in your post.
David, I like your smooth implementation. This is one of the things I prefer in ShareThis. You can make it look completely part of your own design.
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 01:23h, 11 AugustDavid – no worries 🙂
Zoltan – thanks, I’m really looking at this closely and hoping to add this to our platform soon. Let me know when you find out more from ShareThis. Thanks.
Zoltan Szendro
Posted at 10:25h, 11 AugustBrad – I found this on RWW posted today: http://bit.ly/2I5686
It’s an overall statistics disclosed by ShareThis underlining the dominance of email sharing
Mike
Posted at 01:45h, 12 AugustYou should really compare these two to AddToAny: http://www.addtoany.com
Their Share/Save widget is leaps and bounds better than AddThis and ShareThis. Look into their “smart” menu, it’s a pretty clever idea.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-to-any/
I used ShareThis for a sizable blog network on WordPress MU, but it slowed page loads down significantly. My recommendation is AddThis for the bare essential services (digg, delicious), AddToAny if you want people to share and save with *any* service as the name implies.
David Mackey
Posted at 20:36h, 12 AugustNot a bad little app…but the site needs a refresh. It looks too hokey at this point for me to take it seriously. While the developer may be talented right now it says to me, “we are a one man shop.” Not something I want to make a core part of my site. :-/
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 21:02h, 12 AugustMike – good stuff, I’ll definitely check AddToAny.com out. Looks and sounds like a great tool. I am in the comparison stages right now and appreciate your input. Thanks. 🙂
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 21:09h, 12 AugustDavid – it does look pretty plain and simple which could be a good thing, but coming across as a one man shop may not be good. If you read Zoltans comments, looks like Sharethis.com has a bit of funding and may not be going anywhere anytime soon…except up?!?
Bookmarking Service on the Web | GeekEstate Blog
Posted at 23:03h, 12 August[…] Brad Andersohn: David – it does look pretty plain and simple which could be… […]
Zoltan Szendro
Posted at 12:04h, 13 AugustAddToAny looks good as well. It has email tool also through Feedburner, though not that obvious as ShareThis. Feature wise, all three look solid, and it seems that most of the missing ones can be duplicated by the others. I think the name of game here is scalability and nuances in features. Small implementation details will make one utilized by web users more than the other. At this point I prefer ShareThis due to its API and the flexibility of implementation options.
Crunchbase lists all of them, so all 3 are recognized by TechCrunch, with comparable traffic:
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/add-to-any
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/add-this
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sharethis
AddThis has some jump recently, probably due to their recent Snap.com integration.
TechCrunch has some speculation about the $21M funding of ShareThis at http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/13/sharethis-raises-15m-a-lot-of-dough-for-one-widget/
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 13:50h, 13 AugustZoltan – you are such an asset and wealth of information. Thanks for contributing to this comparison. I appreciate you taking the time.
I was wondering if you had heard back or found out anything new about us implementing this into our AR platform and network. Even if individual members chose ShareThis, we still have the issue of embed codes on posts and the widget being added to the sidebar. Let me know what you find out. Thanks.
BTW – I did see the post from techcrunch already. Very interesting… 🙂
Mike
Posted at 01:37h, 14 AugustGreat insight here. David yeah AddToAny’s site is very minimal. I get the same feeling from AddThis, but these are very simple “products” so I think minimalism is fitting.
Looking at Zoltan’s Crunchbase links, I was surprised to see that AddToAny has been around since 3/06! That and their updated blog has me less concerned about AddToAny’s longevity than AddThis.
ShareThis getting $21M is really interesting, but they’re looking to cram ads into their tool? No thanks. Like some of the comments implied in that post, their investors are never going to get that money back. But it makes me wonder if/how the other two make money… Zoltan? 🙂
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 09:01h, 14 AugustMike – what makes you think the other two are making any money? There has to be a way to monetize their product or we all know that in time it’s Bye Bye. I too am interested in how ShareThis can make money without cramming in ads?
Slow Down and Fast
Posted at 13:36h, 27 AugustI’ve started a blog on using social networking to promote our short film Slow Down and Fast. There are a lot of crossovers between independent filmmaking and other business models.
I’ve been trying to add the addthis button to our blogger blog and keep getting error code bX-w90v67.
The integration has been very easy for our website http://www.blindlylefilms.com/slowdown however I haven’t been able to figure out the problem with blogger.
I’ll try the sharethis button and see if it will work. Thanks for the tips.
Adam
Slow Down and Fast
Posted at 13:40h, 27 AugustJust a quick update with sharethis and blogger.
Here is the message I got when trying to access the sharethis widget for blogger.
Currently our Blogger Plugin is not functioning due to a change in widget addition functionality on Blogger’s side. We have taken measures to fix the issue on our end and continue to monitor Blogger’s progress on correcting the issue.
If you’d like to be notified once the Blogger plugin is re-enabled, please send your email address to [email protected].
Adam
http://slowdownandfast.blogspot.com
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 14:15h, 27 AugustI am unable to get the ShareThis widget to work on either the sidebar of our ActiveRain Blogs nor will the code work on posts. The widget shows up on the sidebar, but then disables and conflicts with the email link to that member.
When adding the widget code to a Blog post, only the code shows up and not the widget. I have been trying to work with some of their staff, but I don’t think they are understanding the issues the widget is causing.
I am still interested in using sharethis, but only if they can get it to work, otherwise, I’ll have to stick with the AddThis widget which is working 100% with no glitches or errors in either the widget or the code. Parked for now…
Dave
Posted at 17:52h, 22 SeptemberAddThis.com reporting has been down for over a week. Now the widget is not connecting. Anyone know what’s going on over there? Emails were not returned. Thx!
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 22:17h, 22 SeptemberDave – I was unaware they were down. Do you think ShareThis may be doing a silent takeover? lol!~ Seriously though, I have the addthis widget on a few of my Blogs and had not noticed any issues. Sorry, wish I had some answers for you.
Hawaii real estate agent
Posted at 15:27h, 25 OctoberLooks like the addthis would make it really easy for your users to book mark posts on your site on their favorite social media site. I am going to have to try this out 🙂
ActiveBrad
Posted at 09:24h, 26 OctoberAloha HREA – I do like Addthis, but make sure you check out the ShareThis as well, it is a better product in my own personal opinion. Sometimes it depends on the site or Blog you are trying to use it with, it is not compatible with all Blog sites.
Property Qwest Blog
Posted at 19:01h, 26 OctoberHi Brad,
As always, thank you for your thoughts. I went with the “ShareThis” button. Not having had it installed too long, it does seem to operate quite nicely.
I must say that I struggled with the install because I use “Blogger” hosted on my personal domain. I really had to work the “ShareThis” script settings because the “outside” blogger uses xml tags to import the blog title / specific URL for each written article. After trial and error, I realized that I was receiving the page loaded with errors in IE when I had a title that had an apostrophe in it.
Example below displays part of the “ShareThis” script with the outside Blogger’s xml import “title” tag:
title: ”
If the blog article title being imported is: “A Real Estate Company’s Webmaster”, then the “ShareThis” JavaScript seemed to be reading the first apostrophe after the script’s “title” marker and then closing that apostrophe with the apostrophe within my actual title “string” (Company’s), leaving the third apostrophe not closed at the end of the xml tag, thus resulting in an error.
Needless to say, I had similar problems with the “AddThis” button as well.
Again, with most of the kinks worked out, I’m definitely very happy with the “ShareThis” button. The functionality is smooth, intuitive, and easy to use.
Thank you again for your thoughts!
Property Qwest Blog
Posted at 19:16h, 26 OctoberHi Brad,
I’ll try to display the example again as it looks like the xml tag was stripped in my previous posting. I’ll leave spaces in between the tag this time:
EX: title: ‘ ‘
In my experience, this would lead to an IE page loaded with errors message (IE6 and IE7).
Hopefully this one clears. Thank you again!
Property Qwest Blog
Posted at 19:19h, 26 OctoberSorry, the xml tag is getting stripped and any other method of attempting to display it will only serve to confuse what I’ve said even further. If anyone needs to contact me, feel free to do so as I’ll be more than happy to try and walk them through if they are experiencing a similar problem.
ActiveBrad
Posted at 23:09h, 26 OctoberThanks for trying, what I normally do in that case is a screen shot that displays the xml tag. That’s the next best thing to being there! LOL~ I have had a few issues with sharethis on some other platforms like ActiveRain and WordPress, I wish it was a simple code that was universal and worked on more CSS and HTML formatted sites. Oh well, they’ll get it right in time…I hope. Thanks.
Acmeous
Posted at 23:08h, 21 DecemberI think it in other way. I also know that if my site is bookmarked in at least 20 websites, then also it’s great for me. So the huge list of anyone matters less. But what matters to me is that which one is more usable and more noticeable. If users are not able to notice the bookmark button, then I have no benefit of using anything there. In this case i see that the AddThis widget is more noticeable and useful than that small green button of ShareThis. Secondly the Addthis widget works on mouse-over which is more attractive. The ShareThis widget again needs to be closed by clicking the close button.
That’s why I personally prefer Addthis.
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 12:49h, 22 DecemberI use addthis and share this, but you bring up some interesting points. Personal preference, that’s really the key. Thanks for taking the time to share your point of view, I’ll “Addthis” to this posts’ assortment of comments.
Jerry
Posted at 20:53h, 04 AprilGuys, I was reading an article on another site and a commenter left this one – http://www.crowdsend.com – its great! Using this now.
ActiveBrad
Posted at 14:13h, 06 AprilJerry – thanks for letting us know about that link. The only problem I see with crowdsend is that they aren’t covering the entire “crowd” from A to Z.
Where is ActiveRain and Zillow etc? :-O
Justin Thorp
Posted at 13:01h, 16 AprilHey guys, my name is Justin Thorp and I’m the Community Manager for AddThis. My apologies for not finding the blog post sooner.
AddThis was acquired by the leading widget platform Clearspring (http://clearspring.com) at the end of Sept 2008. At that time, I moved over and started working on the AddThis team and with the AddThis community.
I really appreciate the discussion here. The feedback, thoughts, and ideas are invaluable to us. I read every single blog post, tweet, and comment. I bring it all back to my bosses and work on incorporating it into the product plan.
I hope it’s cool but wanted to clarify as we as add some of my own thoughts to the discussion.
There was some thoughts about the aesthetic of the button and menus provided by the different services. I totally acknowledge that there will be personal preference about which one folks find more pleasing to the eye but I’d ask the question, in the end which drives the most number of shares?
AddThis is the leader in this space. Our button is loaded over 20 billion times per month on both very BIG and also very small web sites. With that reach we’ve been able to get a pretty good view about what we can do to drive more shares & views for our users. We’ve worked hard to incorporate these insights into the way that button & menu have been designed.
For example, we tested having the menu come up on hover or on click. We found that being on hover increased the share rate by 4x. So of course all new versions of the button now show the menu on hover.
With our pretty extensive reach, we’ve worked hard to optimize the button. It should perform really well. The total code size is about 17k, which I think is the smallest in this space. That’s not bad considering we support over 40 destinations and 20 languages and are adding more both.
In regards to raising money and being financially stable, AddThis’s parent company Clearspring has raised multiple rounds of funding and is being used by just about every major media company.
I could talk about plenty more but I’ll stop there. 😉 If anyone has any questions, thoughts, or concerns, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I’d love to chat – [email protected]
Thanks!
-justin
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 16:49h, 16 AprilJustin – it’s great of you to stop by. Thanks for taking the time to find, read, and comment on this post.
Nice to know that WEB 2.0 Customer Service is important to addthis.com, and it’s clearly evident by your comment that you guys deliver beyond expectation.
Now that you’re in the loop, feel free to comment and share anytime you see fit. The door is always open to you here. Thanks again. 🙂
Mara Alexander
Posted at 04:08h, 16 JuneI think it’s only a matter of time before AddThis’ servers are blocked as spammers in every RBL.
Using AddToAny’s service, if a user wants to email a link, they are taken to their own service (or email client). With AddThis, anyone can email anyone else, with no login or verification needed, not even a captcha!
It’s every spammer’s wet dream.
When a few people in their forums brought this to their attention, http://www.addthis.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7252 it was almost as if you could see the developer scratching his head, wondering “Gee, you think this is going to be a problem?”
Gee…you think…? How ANY social media developer in this day and age could NOT see it coming and/or take this sort of this seriously speaks volumes for AddThis as a company.
They’ve already been labeled as “red” in the Web of Trust, and labeled as spam by Hotmail:
http://www.mywot.com/en/forum/3548-why-is-s7-addthis-com-red
Further their IPs don’t have PTR. The suggestion to “just block an email coming from @addthis.com” is one of the stupidest I’ve ever heard, as it doesn’t solve the problem.
And lastly, AddThis is not formatting URLs correctly, though this seems to be a recent/new problem.
Red Gear
Posted at 20:40h, 19 JuneI have many problems fith addthis
Brad Andersohn
Posted at 19:11h, 03 JulyREIM – you are more than welcome, thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment, I appreciate it. 🙂
Kian
Posted at 17:33h, 13 SeptemberI have just moved from ShareThis to AddThis and have to say the latter is much better and more easily customisable.
The interface is smoother and seems to bog down the site less. Also seems to be more compatible with IE 6.
The only downside of AddThis is that the default '+' logo can be hideous, whereas ShareThis' green doodad is much more elegant. But you can change or remove the image in AddThis, so all seems good.
Kian
Posted at 17:33h, 13 SeptemberI have just moved from ShareThis to AddThis and have to say the latter is much better and more easily customisable.
The interface is smoother and seems to bog down the site less. Also seems to be more compatible with IE 6.
The only downside of AddThis is that the default '+' logo can be hideous, whereas ShareThis' green doodad is much more elegant. But you can change or remove the image in AddThis, so all seems good.
Elisha @ Eli Shares
Posted at 10:23h, 17 JanuaryAfter much readings and consideration, I choose Share This. Thanks for the comparison.
xxx
Posted at 02:18h, 18 MayThese crap buttons got to be the most annoying thing on the web. Stop using them! Thank God we can block all this garbage with AdBlock.
Coding Strategist
Posted at 02:04h, 04 JuneI did some research and found out that addThis is the best option. I looked mainly at the loading speed of the various hosted social bookmarking services and addThis was clearly the fastest loading one. For the full test results see: http://codingstrategist.com/social-bookmarking-…
Coding Strategist
Posted at 09:04h, 04 JuneI did some research and found out that addThis is the best option. I looked mainly at the loading speed of the various hosted social bookmarking services and addThis was clearly the fastest loading one. For the full test results see: http://codingstrategist.com/social-bookmarking-…
Matt
Posted at 19:07h, 26 AugustThe feature I like about AddThis is that I was able to easily customize my own buttons and they do have a nice e-mail feature currently going for it.
Rickard
Posted at 03:17h, 30 NovemberAddThis is not easy to get W3C validation, how is it with ShareThis?
/Rickard
cura slabire
Posted at 14:13h, 03 JanuaryI was beeing scouring the Internet for such info and i wanted to thank you for this post. BTW, just off topic, how can i find a copy of this theme? – Thank you
AuGuides
Posted at 07:04h, 28 Maywould you guys say that the sharethis stream is a big advantage over addthis as it will increase your traffic greatly which i heard in the forums but i dont know if it true so would be great if you guys share your thoughts about it.