Popularity of Social Bookmarking Sites

For the past few weeks, I’ve been collecting the number of clicks each social bookmarking service receives in the Socializer. The results rank the popularity of each social bookmarking site, and are very interesting.

Background

The Socializer service is used by many websites as a way to facilitate social bookmarking of their pages by their visitors. When a visitor clicks on a bookmarking link, the Socializer displays a landing page which displays 40+ links, one for each social bookmarking service. Naturally, not all social bookmarking sites are listed, and this has to be kept in mind when looking at the data (more on this later).

The question that popped into my head is, Which service is the most popular? Answering that is interesting on many levels:

• We all know who the top 3 search engines are, but who are the top 3 social bookmarking sites?
• If we know the top (say) 10 social bookmarking services, can we optimize the Socializer landing page? The idea here is to put the top services at the top of the page to increase the page’s usability.
• For search engine optimization, which services do we expect to have the most impact?

There are more questions, some more academic, but that’s enough for now

Collecting the Data

Click data was collected using a modified AJAX Link Tracker running on the Socializer pages. The AJAX Link Tracker is a Javascript-based click tracking script that counts in the background (i.e., does not interfere with the user’s surfing). This makes it ideal for tracking, but limits tracking to only surfers with JS-enabled browsers.

The data is stored in a MySQL database using PHP scripts. The full technical details are on the Tracker’s home page.

Results

A total of 5037 clicks were collected in 20 days, starting on 27 May 2006 and ending today, 16 June 2006. The results, broken down by service are:

I created graphs of the data (PDF) you can download.

Analysis

Unsurprisingly, the most famous service, del.icio.us came out on top. Surprisingly, the number two was Backflip. Personally, I never thought Backflip was that popular, but maybe now I’ll pay more attention to it!

The rest of the rankings make sense: BlinkList comes in third (yep, it’s quite popular from what I gather), followed by digg. I would have thought digg would come out higher, but, if you think about it, it’s not a social bookmarking service per se. In a way, it’s surprising it came out this high given that the marketing of the Socializer places so much emphasis on social bookmarking.

Limitations

OK, so now we think, what’s wrong with the data? Let’s see:

• While collecting the data, de.lirio.us merged with Simpy, and so the statistics for both should be taken with a grain of salt. Now that the merger is complete, I will remove de.lirio.us from the Socializer.
• From looking through which sites use the Socializer, it seems most are related to marketing, SEO, and tech sites. Recently, there has been a steady increase in the number of blogs using the service, the topics of which are very varied. The point here is that the demographics of the visitors might (and probably does) affect the popularity of the services. It just may happen that non-tech site visitors prefer other services than the top ones identified here. Indeed, early in May, before this league table was being tracked, the popularity of delicious was about 8%, slightly more than the 7% we see today.
• The tracking uses Javascript. Not everyone has Javascript enabled, and so this might affect the results. However, since we have no statistics on how many Socializer visitors have JS enabled, we will simply assume those with JS-enabled browsers are a representative sample of all users.
• The final note I want to make is that not all services are listed in the Socializer. I do have a list of a few more to add, particularly Smarking.

Future Rankings

This exercise was so much fun, I want to do it again However, the fact that I am tracking clicks now might induce some people to try to skew the results to favor their favorite service. Have no fear, I’ll keep my eyes and tools out to detect and weed out spurious hits.

Also, I will add a new batch of services and see how they fare in the great scheme of things. The next rankings will need a more sophisticated click tracker, which still needs to be written. Please leave feedback below about any suggestions or improvements in methodology. You can also email me directly.