ShareThis.com Aims to Become A Big Data Platform in the Next Web
Have you noticed those little links next to blog posts and news stories that say "Share This"? Click on that link and you get a pop-up with options to share an article on Delicious, Facebook, StumbleUpon or other services. Did you know that ShareThis.com has raised $21 million from venture capitalists for its version of that service?
If you think that's crazy - you're wrong. ShareThis is a great example of the kind of company that could become a key foundation for innovation in the next era of the web. If it doesn't sell out to advertisers too quickly or too completely. The company released a new version of its widget today and I took the opportunity to talk to CEO Tim Schigel about where the company is headed in the future.
The Sexy New Widget
ShareThis Widget 2.0 from Dave Donohue on Vimeo.
Little changes can mean tens of millions of click-throughs won or lost for a company like ShareThis. The new widget seems like a real improvement. I especially like the one-click buttons to share items with frequent contacts - I use a similar feature on the StumbleUpon toolbar to email things to my wife sometimes, because it's so much faster than email.
Context
Ok, it's a sharing widget with a fat bankroll. What does it really mean though?
Here's how I see it. If the current iteration of the web is based on everyday people creating and distributing content, many people believe that the next iteration will be based on the use of machine learning to build new layers of value on top of that content. What's hot, with what audiences and what kinds of data parsing magic can we work with that information? Few companies are as well positioned to do interesting things with that kind of data as ShareThis. The company says its service is now live on more than 80,000 sites, from scores of small blogs to some very big brands on the web, like ESPN.com, FoxNews, AccessHollywood and Boston.com.
The company has a lot of opportunity for data-centric innovation and CEO Tim Schigel says that's the direction he's looking to take things. You have to hope that companies like this can pull it off and turn into the platforms they say the want to be - and not just advertising platforms, either.
Schigel says that he's watching OpenID closely and that he was pushing Facebook for something like Connect before the service existed. He also told us that there would "soon" be a way for users to easily export their history of shared items, especially now that ShareThis is putting a new emphasis on bookmarking for later retrieval and not just sharing items. I hope that's all true, but when there are tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on the table I never hold our breath about such high minded statements being anything more than PR.
In the meantime, though, it's fascinating to think about what ShareThis is going to do with a big pile of user data and a big pile of money.
The Business Plan For Data
ShareThis gets to see a whole lot of interesting things about the ways we share content online. In August the company published a report about the most common tools people use for sharing. The big takeaway? Email still totally dominates online sharing, even through the ShareThis widget. The second most popular method of sharing was for people to publish content into their Facebook news streams. That data told content producers everywhere that if they want to help readers share their content with larger numbers of people, it's important to make email and Facebook as easy to access as possible.
Beyond different methods of sharing, though, ShareThis has obviously got a lot of data about what kind of content is being shared. I asked Schigel whether ShareThis would be sharing this kind of data it collects, in aggregate, with marketers. "That's ultimately where we go with the business model," he said. The company is talking with selected marketers about sharing access to market insights now, but Schigel emphasized that a few conditions needed to be respected. "We need to make sure that publishers can build trust with their readers," he said, "and we need something unique that marketers can't get elsewhere."
What does ShareThis have that Facebook, for example, doesn't have? Schigel says his company can offer platform independence and a much lower price point. By doing nothing but facilitating sharing, ShareThis simply doesn't have the kind of overhead that Facebook requires to run its entire social networking site.
Obviously ShareThis, even with the success its had in spreading its service so far, is going to need to be in a whole lot more places. Part of that increased reach, the company hopes, will come from its developer platform.
ShareThis for Developers
ShareThis already has a developer Application Programming Interface (API) but Schigel says there will be multiple APIs made available soon. The current offering already allows developers to rewrite attributes, like the title, of shared content objects. Hopefully future APIs will give maximum freedom to developers to do things with shared content data that can't even be imagined yet.
Both marketers and developers will soon be getting access to much more sophisticated data streams than mere bulk popularity. Schigel says that ShareThis is filling its Mountain View office with data wonks and PhDs who are aimed at taking ShareThis data beyond the most immediately obvious opportunities, like content recommendation. The company's Principal Scientist, Huitao Luo has worked as a data scientist at LinkedIn, Yahoo! and at the innovative HP Labs. At HP Lou published on research in algorithms developed for cascading classification systems. Recently hired research architect Gordon Rios came from Inktomi/Yahoo, innovative white label calendaring company ZVents and a list of other companies. Rios has a background in data classification, determination of content's international relevance and spam detection.
These are heavy hitters who should offer up some really innovative APIs for the developer community to process user "attention data" and for marketers to monitor trends in interesting and granular ways.
Hopefully it won't all be done in crass service to the interests of advertisers alone. In order to build that trust that Schigel says he wants with publishers and with developers, ShareThis is going to have to offer some of the network effects its capturing to its non-advertiser partners - not just a handy little widget for distribution. That's not unique enough.
Could ShareThis end up turning its little widget into a big company? I wouldn't bet against it. Will Schigel and his crew of scientists also take advantage of the opportunity to facilitate value creation by a larger web of data-centric content and development innovators, thus growing the total pie that the ad market wants a piece of? We can only hope.
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I've always liked the ShareThis dialog better in terms of looks and functionality, but I use AddThis because I believe they're more familiar to mainstream internet users. I may just make the switch though as I'm not entirely happy with AddThis.
I'm not sure how helpful a data platform would be to me though. One thought is they could provide a search engine, but that would only be limited to the sites and pages that include their button.
Scott - given the nature of your website, I have a hard time imagining that a data platform would not be of interest to you and your users. Let's just say, for example, that you or someone else were able to use a ShareThis data platform to develop an early warning system to tell you that people who liked your site's content had been exhibiting a big increase in interest in a related type of content that your site wasn't yet covering. Thus it would behoove you to see what this new related interest in your community is and perhaps, in your case, offer a new forum section on that topic and seed it with high quality content?
I don't know, I'm just shooting from the hip here, but I think that a data platform may be to the next 5 years online what RSS feeds or comment fields are to the web today - essential game changing value feature enablers.
Marshall, you have a good point. I'm just not so sure I'd want to pay for that information. Maybe they'd have to offer part of it for free to wet our appetite in order to monetize such a system. While I'd love to see what other sites my users are sharing, fortunately many of them come to me directly and ask for additional sections.
With such a database, ShareThis may become in the coming months the ultimate data platform for CRM and reputation management, that are just 2 direct applications of such a DB. That would wide open the business potential of this company, and should be worth $21M. Though, I assume they would need more funding to achieve this plan (if I'm right)
Their business model is flawed. Who owns the data? who owns the user registration? ShareThis or the Publisher?
As soon as ShareThis try to monetize the data the publisher will pull their widget from their site and put their own widget and feed that into their own registration system and own analytics.
You saw the issue FaceBook had recently with their user data, this is worse.
Marshall,
Thanks for the post. ShareThis has strict controls around user and publisher privacy. Ultimately, users and publishers will benefit most from the services we plan offer. There are many opportunities to simplify and enhance the sharing process for everyone. We believe publishers could be more informed than they are today about how their content is shared and distributed. It's all good.
"It's all good" ? That fills me with confidence...
So Tim, who owns the data?
The ShareThis model requires adoption from publishes, THEN users, where social bookmarking sites could hypothetically go in this direction and get their hands on the same data with ONLY user adoption. Am I missing something here?
The highly commercial nature of ShareThis.com and restrictions on the use of the trademarked ShareThis icon resulted in the creation of a free, open, community-driven alternative for visibly sharing your content. See the comparison chart at:
http://openshareicons.com
The Open Share Icon is used in the iBegin Share plugin for WordPress, for example:
http://www.ibegin.com/labs/share/
Harry,
The users and publishers own their respective data, and we believe it's important to promote that principle across the Web.
Tim
This is solid. We're planning on using the sharethis widgets on our CMS site for our artists. We were going to go with addthis but I liked the functionality of sharethis better. Now I'm even more convinced they were the right choice. Nice work boys.
OK - so the publishers, content creators and users own the data.
SO WHO GETS THE MONEY once advertising is introduced. The large publishers have their own media sales team and won't won't Share This firing out ads to their audience ad hoc. The smaller publishers will grab any money thats on offer - is there any? Or is Share this under the illusion they get too keep it all ...... and won't the media networks want to be involved somewhere?
We believe publishers could be more informed than they are today about how their content is shared and distributed. It's all good.
ShareThis looks great on the surface, but the reality seems to be that they have some pretty weird stuff going on behind the scenes. A common complaint on their forums is that the password reset feature just downright fails to work, and I can verify that. Contacting their support via Feedback there is entirely unresponsive. Another oddity to me is that the forums require a separate registration and password than the one you use for your ShareThis account. There's definitely something odd going on with them.
I am considering adding ShareThis to my website...but, the issues revolving around the rights behind the content is discouraging. My business is that of a niche market and the data collected from our site would be industry specific proprietary information. Why should anyone other than my business have the right to exploit that information for money?
I am considering adding ShareThis to my website...but, the issues revolving around the rights behind the content is discouraging. My business is that of a niche market and the data collected from our site would be industry specific proprietary information. Why should anyone other than my business have the right to use that information and potentially sell it?
This "product" reeks of all those poor ideas from 1999. The practical reality is that you cannot sustainably make any money from aggregating others people data and trying to sell it as your own.
Even more depressing, is that it feels like this has been developed, and is continuing to be developed, very very poorly. The technology to build this widget is straight forward- nothing needed to be invented here. You just need people who have real experience building commercial software products, and have experience with large, transactional database systems. Every time a new widget rolls out, it's a mess. I'm sure if that's true from the front-end, the back-end is probably really scary.