1 Billion Peoples' Interests Now Tracked by AddThis
AddThis, one of the leading link sharing services used by sites all around the web (including this one), announced today that it now offers publishers information about the types of interests their readers and content sharers have demonstrated on the other sites they have visited.
Context & Ripple Effects
AddThis has been quietly accumulating behavioral data through its ubiquitous share button since at least 2007, when TechCrunch flagged how much information the widget was already gathering. Earlier this year it folded Facebook's Like button into its publisher toolbox, deepening its footprint on partner sites.
Today's announcement converts that passive collection into a product: publishers using AddThis can now see what interests their readers have demonstrated across other sites they visit, drawn from a pool spanning one billion people. The move positions a free embeddable button as the front end of a cross-site audience-data business, with rival ShareThis — covered here in 2008 as a space-saving alternative — operating the same kind of distributed installation base.
First-order effects
- Publishers on AddThis gain interest profiles of their own audiences built from off-site behavior, a data layer no single site could assemble from its logs alone.
- AddThis monetizes an asset it was previously giving away: the same button that drives shares now doubles as a sensor feeding a billion-person interest database.
Second-order effects
- ShareThis and other sharing-widget vendors face pressure to answer with comparable audience-insight products or concede the analytics layer to AddThis.
- Advertisers and ad networks gain a new source of interest-based targeting signals sourced outside the walled gardens, shifting some leverage away from platforms that control their own login data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, every embedded social widget becomes de facto tracking infrastructure, making the interest graph a commodity assembled by intermediaries rather than any single site — and drawing privacy scrutiny toward invisible third-party cookies rather than visible buttons.
The trend: Sharing widgets are evolving from traffic utilities into distributed audience-measurement networks, turning the open web's embeddable buttons into raw material for interest-graph advertising.