Most Popular Social Sites used for Sharing Content on the Internet

Now the most popular sites in 2009 which people are using for sharing content on the Internet is Facebook followed by a distant Twitter. Surprisingly, more people now prefer to bookmark content on Yahoo! Bookmarks and Windows Live Favorites than Google or Delicious which dominated the scene in 2008 and 2007.

Social Bookmarking – 2007

This graph show how people were sharing web pages in the year 2007. Google Bookmarks and delicious were the two most favorite destinations for bookmarking online content while a large number of Internet users also preferred saving pages into their local bookmarks or favorites.

Social Bookmarking – 2008

Habits changed in 2008 as social networks replaced social bookmarking sites.

Facebook, Digg, MySpace became the most preferred destinations for sharing content while delicious, Google Bookmarks and other “online bookmarking” services took a backseat.

If you ever wanted to know how people are storing or sharing content on the web, this graph says this all. It shows a list of most popular social services that are used by netizens to share or save web pages.

Email continues to be the most favorite mode for sharing links on the Internet followed by Facebook and Digg though its a formidable lead.

These statistics are provided by ShareThis and if you compare these numbers with what AddThis provided an year ago, you’ll see an interesting trend:

1. More people prefer sharing links on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace rather than the regular social bookmarking services like delicious.

2. Windows Live is gaining ground and appears almost as popular as Google Bookmarks. The gap was very wide last year.

3. Don’t discount Technorati yet. It looks like lot of people do add blogs / websites to their “Technorati Favorites” and it’s more popular than say Diigo, ma.gnolia.com or Mixx.com.

Social Bookmarking – 2009

Enter 2009. Facebook is now the most popular site for sharing content followed by a distant Twitter. Surprisingly, more people now prefer to bookmark content on Yahoo! Bookmarks and Windows Live Favorites than Google or Delicious which dominated the scene in 2007.

Social Bookmarking – 2010

And here the next 10 places where Internet users are posting content with the purpose of bookmarking or for sharing with their social contacts.

The sharing statistics for 2009 are courtesy Pat from AddToAny while the numbers for 2008 and 2007 were provided by ShareThis and AddThis respectively. All these companies provide some very awesome social sharing widgets for both blogs and regular sites.

While the report suggests that more people are using Facebook than email to share content on the Internet, I guess that may not be the case because not everyone feels comfortable sharing their email address with a widget so they probably use their own email client to share links of web pages with friends.

Sharing is one of the biggest activities online. Be it news, links, videos, music, legally or illegally people share a lot of content on the Internet. Social media is becoming the preferred method and new numbers from Add ToAny, makers of a popular widget allowing users to easily share content across multiple sites, show that Facebook is by far the biggest source with 29.4% of the shares on the widget coming from the social network.

The rise of social networking as the main way to share content is not that surprising and neither is the decline of email, which now accounts for only 13.8 % of shares.

The third most popular method of sharing content is now Twitter, gaining on email with 11.1 % of shares. With the massive growth, in recent months it has become a hub for activity and considering that it has almost ten times less users than Facebook, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it becoming the biggest source not so far in the future. MySpace on the other hand only got 4.3 % of the shares, further confirming its decline.

Yahoo properties also did rather well, with Yahoo Bookmarks getting 4.4 %, Delicious 3.8 % and Digg 3.8 % are in equal shares. Adding up Yahoo Messenger’s 0.5 percent and the Internet giant makes up 14.4 % of the shares, which puts it at number two after Facebook but ahead of email. Link aggregators also accounted for a fair portion of the shares, namely Word Press with 0.5 %, Reddit with 2.6 % and StumbleUpon with 3.0 %.

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