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How To Design For One Billion Users

13 points by FrankGruber5 16y ago

circuitbreaker 16y ago
I call bullshit. One BILLION unique users? Just a quick scrub on Google gives a bunch of sources saying that the total number of people on the Internet worldwide is between 1.4 and 2 billion. So AddThis is (or has been) used by up to 50% of ALL Internet users?! I don't think so.
- stewartallen 16y ago
  As of last month, Comscore, who is in the business of measuring such things, puts AddThis at 57% of total world wide internet users (which they measure as 1.3 billion users). They put AddThis at 80% of total US internet users (which they measure as 212 million). Comscore's world wide penetration is not as deep historically as US, and is widely considered to undercount this #.
neworbit 16y ago
I've never even heard of these guys. Alexa says they're significantly outranked by Digg (#165 vs #125), which is absolutely nowhere near a billion users and would be really lucky to be 5% of that. Unless they run a huge spam botnet, I can't see how they can have touched a billion people.
- willmeyer 16y ago
  For folks curious about the number, AddThis is a widget that publishers use in their pages. So yes, the numbers are uniques, counted as accurately as it is possible to count such things given cookie deletion rates, etc. Here for example is builtwith's view of AddThis usage on pages relative to other third party widgets, like the FB Like button, to give you a sense: http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets
- benologist 16y ago
  Alexa is probably very inaccurate for them because AddThis is a widget that wraps a number of social services into one little package. It's used on tons of websites. The 1b may or may not include repeat visitors, they say both things on their website. Either way though, when you're integrated in other people's properties rather than trying to guide traffic to your own 1b gets a lot more possible - I'm almost up to 200m/month already.
  - stewartallen 16y ago
    the 1 billion number is de-duped 30-day viewers. the AddThis widget is seen billions of times each day on millions of domains.
PhilWright 16y ago
They make no mention of how they make any money. Any ideas on the business model that is paying for all this bandwidth etc?

13 points by FrankGruber5 16y ago

I call bullshit. One BILLION unique users? Just a quick scrub on Google gives a bunch of sources saying that the total number of people on the Internet worldwide is between 1.4 and 2 billion. So AddThis is (or has been) used by up to 50% of ALL Internet users?! I don't think so.

stewartallen 16y ago
As of last month, Comscore, who is in the business of measuring such things, puts AddThis at 57% of total world wide internet users (which they measure as 1.3 billion users). They put AddThis at 80% of total US internet users (which they measure as 212 million). Comscore's world wide penetration is not as deep historically as US, and is widely considered to undercount this #.

neworbit 16y ago

I've never even heard of these guys. Alexa says they're significantly outranked by Digg (#165 vs #125), which is absolutely nowhere near a billion users and would be really lucky to be 5% of that. Unless they run a huge spam botnet, I can't see how they can have touched a billion people.

willmeyer 16y ago
For folks curious about the number, AddThis is a widget that publishers use in their pages. So yes, the numbers are uniques, counted as accurately as it is possible to count such things given cookie deletion rates, etc. Here for example is builtwith's view of AddThis usage on pages relative to other third party widgets, like the FB Like button, to give you a sense: http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets
benologist 16y ago
Alexa is probably very inaccurate for them because AddThis is a widget that wraps a number of social services into one little package. It's used on tons of websites. The 1b may or may not include repeat visitors, they say both things on their website. Either way though, when you're integrated in other people's properties rather than trying to guide traffic to your own 1b gets a lot more possible - I'm almost up to 200m/month already.
- stewartallen 16y ago
  the 1 billion number is de-duped 30-day viewers. the AddThis widget is seen billions of times each day on millions of domains.

PhilWright 16y ago

They make no mention of how they make any money. Any ideas on the business model that is paying for all this bandwidth etc?