When I read the recent TechCrunch article saying that Facebook dominates social sharing on the web, claiming 45% of all social sharing, I was very surprised as our data at Tynt shows something rather different. TechCrunch’s data came from Gigya, which tracks explicit sharing using their tool set on 5,000 sites on the web. But by only using this data, TechCrunch is missing something very important. Tynt currently tracks sharing via copy/paste on over 400,000 sites ranging from many of the top Tier 1 media sites on the web through to the long tail of blogs. As a result, we uniquely see how over 200 million web users share content in a very precise way.
The fundamental breakdown is that the TechCrunch numbers don’t account for sharing by email, or sharing in other online areas like discussion forums, both of which are very significant.
So how much sharing happens every month? Let’s take a rough cut at the numbers: there are an estimated 1 trillion to 1.4 trillion page views on the web per month. I’ll use the 1 trillion number for this analysis. Our Tynt data shows that slightly over 2% of all page views result in content sharing via copy/paste meaning over 20 Billion sharing actions. By comparison, explicit sharing buttons built into many content pages result in about 400 million shares every month. Another very common way to share data is by sharing links via Twitter. According to TechCrunch Bit.ly shortens 2.1 billion links per month, which encompasses a significant amount of the Twitter sharing. Add this all together and we can conclude that there are at least 22.5 billion monthly shares.
Web Sharing Breakdown
If Facebook’s total shares that TechCrunch reported are 5 billion (22%) – where are the other 78% of shares going?
Our data shows a very different picture. I’ve created two charts, the first one showing percentage of social sharing on the web based upon the total number of shares.
Sharing By Total Shares
Clearly, e-mail is by far and away the largest source of social sharing. Logically, this makes sense. How often do you share via email as opposed to other sources? The Facebook percentage we see at Tynt is consistent with Facebook’s own metrics.
Another interesting way to look at this is how many visits the sharing activity generates. It turns out that not all sharing methods are as effective at generating new site traffic as others. For example, while Digg only accounts for 0.2% of all shares shown above, it drives a far higher percentage of incremental visits because Digg users are more likely to click on a shared link attached to content. Check out the results if we look at the data from this perspective:
Sharing By New Visits Generated
Note: the ‘other’ category above includes discussion forums, blog postings, and other content.
The bottom line? While Facebook is clearly a force to be reckoned with in social sharing, crediting it with 45% of all sharing is crazy. Email continues to dominate in the world of social sharing, and other sources such as forums and blogs still drive a tremendous amount of the content, and we don’t see this changing any time soon. By the way, if you are wondering what content is being copied off of your site, just sign up for a free Tynt account and start learning right away!
. Over the next few weeks we will be posting here much more regularly on what is going on with Tynt, in our industry, and with our users, so stay tuned!
Tynt CEO and co-founder Derek Ball has been selected to speak at the upcoming BlogWorld Expo event which takes place in Las Vegas Oct 15-17. His talk, “Can You Benefit from Rampant Copying of Your Content?” will target an issue that is near and dear to just about every blogger and online publishers: content being copied from their sites. In it, he’ll draw on information gleaned to date from the over 5 Billion page views per month on 100,000 sites that now use Tynt. Specifically, he’ll provide insight into
As we put in the long hours to continue to build Tynt into one of the most useful services for online publishers, bloggers and major websites, it’s really nice to get a pat on the back along the way. So, naturally we were very pleased to learn that Tynt was selected as one of the 1