ShareThis: Making Sharing on the Web Easier

When browsing through articles or watching videos on the internet, people often see a widget containing several buttons that allow them to share and post the items they like to their social networking profiles and blogs. This very useful button was brought to us by ShareThis, a company that lets you do just that. 

The Palo Alto-based company was founded in 2007 by Dr. David E. Goldberg, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Tim Schigel, a director for Blue Chip, a venture capital firm. Since its inception, the ShareThis widget has become a staple of social media sites and other websites containing information that people like to share with their family, friends, and colleagues.  Aside from being able to share content to a variety of social media sites, people can also choose to send the link to their email and IM contacts. 

Other than making it easier for netizens to share the content that they like with their contacts, ShareThis also benefits site owners, advertisers, bloggers, and online publishers. This is because the share widget also serves as an analytics tool. It records the number of times a video, slideshow, or article has been shared, and this helps individuals and companies understand their audience better. The data collected gives them a solid idea of what topics are the most relevant to internet users and what most people like to see.  They can then find a way to relate that to their brand and give the people what they want.

Although it took some time for the company to grow, it was worth the wait. By 2011, the ShareThis widget could already be found in over 1 million website.  In that same year, Forbes mentioned ShareThis as one of the 16 Companies to Watch with Under $1 Million in Sales.