New Metric Measures Web Site 'Sharing Quality'

Social media sharing platform ShareThis has launched a new methodology for measuring the 'sharing quality' of sites across the web.

ShareThis provides a platform through which users can see what web content their friends are sharing. For publishers and advertisers, it supplies real-time analytics to help understand the social media behavior of users sharing content from a site, and its dashboard presents a summary of that 'sharing-driven' activity.

The new standard, the 'Social Quality Index', claims to be the first measure of web-wide sharing activity. The software derives a raw social traffic score by taking a combined measure of a site's outbound share and inbound clickback traffic, and compares it to page views. The resulting figure can then be benchmarked against stats from more than one million sites and 10 billion monthly shares in the ShareThis network.

The tool will offer publishers and advertisers site rankings across 27 content categories. It can also be used to identify types of user with higher purchase intent, and audiences who are more likely to disseminate content widely.

CEO Kurt Abrahamson states: 'Our social quality standard empowers publishers, allowing them to take advantage of additional social audience monetization opportunities that are available. We're the first to rank based on sharing, we're providing competitive intelligence, and we're helping to clearly identify ways to monetize social activity.'

The new standard is being validated across the ShareThis network of publishers in partnership with Starcom MediaVest Group.

Web sites: www.sharethis.com and www.smvgroup.com .