My Chat With ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel

Earlier this month, ShareThis announced a new partnership with ExactTarget. This week the company rolled out a new widget (the formal announcement comes next week) which unlocks even more power when it comes to sharing content across the Web. This morning I sat down with ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel to discuss the new widget and how the company is doing.

ShareThis launched 15 months ago and currently has 2 million users a month and 100,000 websites actively using their widget (we are one of them). Sites from FoxNews to 1-800-flowers all use the ShareThis widget and each site uses the widget in a slightly different manner. The new widget pushes the concept of creating an account and Tim showed me that you can import your contacts into ShareThis from Gmail/Outlook/etc and then easily send people links. In fact the "send" option allows you to send one message which hits one person via email, one person via AIM, one via MySpace, etc. all at once – pretty nifty. The numbers of registered accounts are low but Tim says the registered number is growing each month.

We had a good discussion about placement of sharing icons and number of sharing icons. What I’ve found is that here on CN the usage of sharing is very low while on my other, more mainstream-oriented sites, the usage is higher. This is most likely due to the fact that early adopters have their own methods of sharing (bookmarklets, friendfeed, etc.).

I also asked about their business model and revenue. Tim said they are not earning revenue now but that they have lots of ways to better monetize sites for publishers and that the business model will be forthcoming late this year.

Here’s an example of the new share button – give it a try by sharing this story!