A lot happened this year. The electric scooter craze took over, the Yanny vs. Laurel clip divided the internet and a Walmart yodeling session landed one 11-year-old a Coachella performance.
Here at AddThis, we had some noteworthy milestones of our own this year. Here’s a look back on what happened at AddThis in 2018.
We Became Free!
Our favorite news of the year – AddThis is now FREE!
In order to maintain simplicity and share AddThis with as many sites as possible, we got rid of our Pro and Business paid plans and became an entirely free platform. All the features and capabilities that were previously reserved for paying users are now available for all users!
If you haven’t yet, take a look around your AddThis dashboard and check out all of the new features and customizations available. If you were a Pro or Business plan customer, feel free to use your savings on some holiday shopping.
We Became the First Third-Party Sharing Buttons on AMP…
AddThis became the first third-party sharing plugin to be available for AMP!
AMP is a new open source initiative that stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is meant to improve the mobile web browsing experience by ensuring web pages load almost instantly. AddThis was excited to join the initiative as one of the first third-party plugins to be available as an AMP component.
Look for more AMP compatible AddThis tools to be rolled out in 2019!
…And Watched AMP Shares Take Off
Speaking of AMP, this AddThis customer saw a 10% increase in AMP URLs and a 400% increase in total shares ( including non-AMP pages) after installing AddThis share buttons on their site. They also saw a 2.5% growth in new users!
Check out the case study here.
We Resolved a Share Count Snag
Did it feel like your share counts doubled this year? If it did, that’s because we introduced a highly requested feature that prevents the loss of share counts after switching your site from HTTP to HTTPS.
Social services like Facebook, Pinterest, etc., treat HTTP and HTTPS protocols as separate URLs, meaning these social services will only display share counts for one version of a URL or the other. Because of this, website owners that switched their site to HTTPS would lose any share counts they had acquired.
We understand how important share counts are to our customers, so we worked hard and found a solution. AddThis sharing buttons now display the share counts for the HTTP + HTTPS versions for a URL.
We Supported the IAB Framework
2018 was memorably the year of GDPR. Rather than leaving our customers to figure out how to become GDPR compliant on their own, we compiled helpful information to assist publishers in using the IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (IAB Framework).
Here is our guide with details on how to implement consent management tools for your sites.
We Released our Magento Extension
We kicked off the year by launching our AddThis Share Buttons extension for the Magento Marketplace. Our Share Buttons extension is the easiest way to add sidebar share buttons to your Magento site.
Check out our Magento extension in the Magento Marketplace.
We Launched WhatsApp Sharing for Desktop
Early in the year we also launched the ability to share to WhatsApp directly from your desktop or laptop browser using AddThis Share Buttons.
Now, when you come across an article you want to share, you can send it directly to your WhatsApp contacts from your computer instead of having to switch to your phone.
Learn more about our WhatsApp sharing button and activate it on your website here.
We Helped Websites Owners All Over the World Engage Their Users
Thanks to our network of AddThis users, we have some exciting numbers to share!
There were over 880 million total shares on the AddThis network in nearly all of the countries in the world. There were over 2.2 billion total clicks on content that was shared. That’s over 6.6 million clicks each day!
Content was shared to over 200 different social and messaging channels. The top 3 channels for sharing included Facebook, Twitter. and WhatsApp. Almost one-third of total shares were on Facebook.
Stats from January 1, 2018 to December 11, 2018 (340 total days)
It can feel like each year goes by in the blink of an eye, but it’s amazing to look back and see how much was accomplished in a year. Thanks to all our customers who made it all possible!