Save Space on Your Blog with ShareThis
How many promotion buttons does an article need? Under each story right on this here blog, you'll see three—for digg, delicious, and Slashdot—and that's not as many as you see on other blogs. How about just one?
Context & Ripple Effects
Blog-side sharing has been accumulating chrome for years: Yahoo! Search blog described embedding share buttons on websites back in October 2005, and TechCrunch noted in March 2007 that the AddThis widget was gathering interesting usage data — evidence that single-button aggregators were already collecting clickstreams across sites. AppScout's post makes the space argument explicit: its own blog carries three buttons under every story (digg, delicious, Slashdot), and ShareThis pitches one widget as the replacement.
First-order effects
- Bloggers running per-service buttons face a direct trade: keep three-plus pieces of screen real estate and their distinct audiences, or switch to a single ShareThis-style widget and reclaim layout space while outsourcing menu curation.
Second-order effects
- Aggregators like ShareThis and AddThis compete for placements, and whoever wins them inherits the clickstream data individual buttons never pooled — turning the humble share row into a cross-site traffic dataset, as AddThis's early data haul already suggested.
Third-order effects
- If consolidation holds, the big destination services lose guaranteed homepage real estate on blogs and must either join the aggregators' menus or ship their own branded widgets to claw visibility back — shifting leverage toward whoever controls the button.
The trend: Social sharing is consolidating from a row of per-service buttons into single third-party widgets that trade blog space savings for aggregated traffic data.